Best 11632 quotes in «government quotes» category

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

Some of the most corrupt people that you will meet in life are working in corporate government law enforcement. They make criminals look like amateurs.

Some party hack decreed that the people had lost the government's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be be simpler, If the government simply dissolved the people And elected another?

Some people are good only because they are afraid of punishment. These justify why we need government

Sometimes a revolution turns into an actual government, or at the very least an actual way of life that contrasts with days past like blood on snow. Such was the case in France, where even as the guillotine released a steady river of gore, Royalist insurrections were suppressed by what had become a sophisticated military. In Toulon, the Royalist insurrection in 1793 led to an actual siege by republicans, spearheaded by none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. The Royalists in Toulon, supported by the British and Spanish, were feared by the republicans as an existential threat to every hope and promise of the revolution. For months there were bombardments, cannon fire that made the windows in the prison tremble.

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

…so that’s why I’m pleased to announce my endorsement of Sarah Palin for President in 2016: because you know that whoever gets elected is going to fuck you over. So why not vote for somebody that you actually want to get fucked by?

So you don't think the government is responsible for anything?" "Oh, it's responsible," Rafferty says. "It's responsible for the sloppiness and imprecision of the War on Terror, for example. It's responsible for taking people's tax dollars and spending the country into debt on useless wars and pointless pork projects to buy votes. It's responsible for bailing out the banks instead of standing up for the people the banks cheated. It's responsible for plenty,

So why don’t Americans cheat? Because they think that their system is legitimate. People accept authority when they see that it treats everyone equally, when it is possible to speak up and be heard, and when there are rules in place that assure you that tomorrow you won’t be treated radically different from how you are treated today. Legitimacy is based on fairness, voice and predictability, and the U.S. government, as much as Americans like to grumble about it, does a pretty good job of meeting all three standards. Pg. 293

Start believing in conspiracies, because those who have the power conspire, and they keep their power by having people not believing in conspiracies.

State first, subject second, statesman last.

Statism is an unnatural disaster.

Statism ends with an eye roll.

Stop this government overreach. They can't just come in here and tell us what to do." "Uhm, it's school," Tony said. "That's kind of the point.

States are far less violent than traditional bands and tribes. Modern Western countries, even in their most war-torn centuries, suffered no more than around a quarter of the average death rate of nonstate societies, and less than a tenth of that for the most violent one.

Struggles to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential to their time and country have been waged by many good as well as by evil men. Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon but at other times and places the ends have been racial or territorial security, support of a dynasty or regime, and particular plans for saving souls. As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. . . . Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. It seems trite but necessary to say that the First Amendment to our Constitution was designed to avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings. There is no mysticism in the American concept of the State or of the nature or origin of its authority. We set up government by consent of the governed, and the Bill of Rights denies those in power any legal opportunity to coerce that consent. Authority here is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority. If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.

Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

Supposedly, the government is in the process of saving us from terrorists. No one has quite figured out who is going to save us from the government. It seems it will have to be us. Part of what we built works great. Part of what we built badly needs fixing. It is delusional to think that a few politicians can fix what took several hundred million people to build—and run down.

Surely of all ‘rights of man’, this right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.

[Suggesting an additional definition for 'politics':] The art of organizing and handling men in large numbers, manipulating votes, and, in especial, appropriating public wealth.

Surveillance is a two way street.

Susan Margaret Collins was born on December 7, 1952 in Caribou, Maine and is presently the senior United States Senator from Maine. Senator Collins has served in the Senate since 1997 and chaired the Senate Committee on Homeland Security from 2003 to 2007. She now is the Chairwoman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Collins is a graduate of St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts college, in Canton, New York. Considered a moderate Republican, she became the only Republican in the U.S. Senate currently representing a state in New England. Her vote was one of three republican votes in the Senate that helped to defeat a bill designed to destroy the Affordable Health Care Program presently in effect. John McCain's heroic stand only mattered because Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski bravely stood by him! It was their courage that saved health care for approximately 22 million people.

System fails when people with ability don't have authority and people with authority don't have ability.

Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare. Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food.

(Talking about the movement to deny the prevalence and effects of adult sexual exploitation of children) So what does this movement consist of? Who are the movers and shakers? Well molesters are in it, of course. There are web pages telling them how to defend themselves against accusations, to retain confidence about their ‘loving and natural’ feelings for children, with advice on what lawyers to approach, how to complain, how to harass those helping their children. Then there’s the Men’s Movements, their web pages throbbing with excitement if they find ‘proof’ of conspiracy between feminists, divorcing wives and therapists to victimise men, fathers and husbands. Then there are journalists. A few have been vitally important in the US and Britain in establishing the fightback, using their power and influence to distort the work of child protection professionals and campaign against children’s testimony. Then there are other journalists who dance in and out of the debates waggling their columns behind them, rarely observing basic journalistic manners, but who use this debate to service something else – a crack at the welfare state, standards, feminism, ‘touchy, feely, post-Diana victimhood’. Then there is the academic voice, landing in the middle of court cases or inquiries, offering ‘rational authority’. Then there is the government. During the entire period of discovery and denial, not one Cabinet minister made a statement about the prevalence of sexual abuse or the harm it caused. Finally there are the ‘retractors’. For this movement to take off, it had to have ‘human interest’ victims – the accused – and then a happy ending – the ‘retractors’. We are aware that those ‘retractors’ whose parents trail them to newspapers, television studios and conferences are struggling. Lest we forget, they recanted under palpable pressure.

Take the civil service out of government and the country will collapse, take politics out of government and the country will flourish.

Taxation is theft, purely and simply even though it is theft on a grand and colossal scale which no acknowledged criminals could hope to match. It is a compulsory seizure of the property of the State’s inhabitants, or subjects.

Tea Party adherents seemed to arrive at their dislike of the federal government via three routes--through their religious faith (the government curtailed the church, they felt), through hatred of taxes (which they saw as too high and too progressive), and through its impact on their loss of honor.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly, and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as its victims. But so is war. You could says that terrorism is the privatization of war. Terrorists are the free marketeers of war. They are people who don't believe that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Terrorism is the use of violence or intimidation in the pursuit of a political aim. The highest political aim is the creation and enforcement of law. Cops use violence and intimidation to enforce law. Therefore, all cops are, by definition, terrorists.

That day -- Monday, 25 February 1980 -- unfolded, in the context of British politics, much like any other day. Government, in those days, happened rather like a tree falling in a forest when there was no one there to witness it. For those among the Great British Public who wanted to believe that something was happening, the assumption was that something was indeed most probably happening, while for those who still needed to see it, or hear it, to believe it, there remained a high degree of doubt that anything was happening at all.

That is the one thing that makes me a Democrat, I suppose - this idea that our communal values, our sense of mutual responsibility and social solidarity, should express themselves not just in the church or the mosque or the synagogue; not just on the blocks where we live, in the places where we work, or within our own families; but also through our government.

That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone. (to Horatio Gates, 1798)

That is the problem with governments these days. They want to do things all the time; they are always very busy thinking of what things they can do next. That is not what people want. People want to be left alone to look after their cattle.

That out of sight, out of mind philosophy comes off so true but back at it like a flood gate of thoughts. Enchanting the minds of those that forgot about the god. I can paint a vivid picture of the game like color of office. CEO illumination of supreme bosses,no strike out or taking any loses, a take over of hostages through these dry land mirages but I have the living water that quenches. It's the penal gland like a third eye view, a Promised Land flowing through for the chosen few.

That's the problem with this whole country. Fucking vast prosperity. No one has any real problems anymore. Ninety percent of the damn politicians in this town either think there's no war on terror, or if we'd just be nice to these zealots they'll leave us alone. Well, that ain't going to fucking happen. The Huns are circling, and we're sitting around arguing about gay rights and prayer and guns and global warming and all kinds of bullshit. These idiots will eventually wake up to the threat, but by then it might be too late. (Stan Hurley)

That effort to undermine competitive markets is no better in the market for labor than it is for goods and services.

That is indeed the best way to dumb down the masses: make them do the same thing over and over; let them have their fireworks every Bastille Day and let them gorge themselves every New Year's Eve. When the body repeats the same action, the mind adopts it and keeps the repetition going day and night, stopping all thought processes.

That was what you did. You died. You did not know what it was about. They threw you in and told you the rules and the first time they caught you off base they killed you. Or they killed you gratuitously like Aymo. Or gave you the syphilis like Rinaldi. But they killed you in the end. You could count on that. Stay around and they would kill you.

That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels.

That which we want less of in society should rarely be privatized and that which we want more of often should be.

The actions of government, we are told, bear down only on imprudent souls who provoke them. The man who resigns himself and keeps silent is always safe. Reassured by this worthless and specious argument, we do not protest against the oppressors. Instead we find fault with the victims. Nobody knows how to be brave even prudentially. Everyone stays silent, keeping his head low in the self-deceiving hope of disarming the powers that be by his silence. People give despotism free access, flattering themselves they will be treated with consideration. Eyes to the ground, each person walks in silence the narrow path leading him safely to the tomb.

The American government is premised on the theory that if the individual man is to be free, his ideas, his beliefs, his ideology, his philosophy, must be placed beyond the reach of government.

The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages. Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure. The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.

The answer of Solon on the question, 'Which is the most perfect popular govemment,' has never been exceeded by any man since his time, as containing a maxim of political morality, 'That,' says he, 'where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution.

The Army's new pitch was simple. Good pay, good benefits, a manageable amount of adventure... but don't worry, we're not looking to pick fights these days. For a country that had paid so dear a price for its recent military buccaneering, the message was comforting. We still had the largest and most technologically advanced standing army in the world, the most nuclear weapons, the best and most powerful conventional weapons systems, the biggest navy. At the same time, to the average recruit the promise wasn't some imminent and dangerous combat deployment; it was 288 bucks a month (every month), training, travel, and experience. Selling the post-Vietnam military as a career choice meant selling the idea of peacetime service. It meant selling the idea of peacetime. Barf.

The authorities? The authorities?” I laughed. “Why is it people think the authorities are some form of gods with either great justice or great, cunning evil, rather than the same plodding fools they see in their daily lives, and most of all in their mirrors?

The best one can hope for is a government favorable to certain claims and demands from the Left.

The best government is no government at all.

The best kept secrets are those that lie in plain sight.