Best 11632 quotes in «government quotes» category

Yes," said Pericles. "Today's patriotism may be tomorrow's treason, if it serves any judge or politician. And so it would go with any statute you might define today, no matter how explicit the terms. Let us suppose that a future Roman Head of Stae is a plotting and ambitious his country. So he might say to his pople, 'I love my country and in the name of that love I propose such and such an amendment to the Constitution, of which our fathers would have approved in the light of today's needs and changing circumstances. In truth, the Constitution of our fathers really means so-and-so.' I assure you, gentlemen, that he will already have a band of fellow traitors who will uphold him, and help to confuse the citizens. Then, if any patriot would oppose him the traitor will denounce him for treason! You can be certain, then,, that the unfortunate patriot would suffer the penalty for the alleged crime.

Yet we also have much in common with the period of the witch hunts, namely financial and social collapse born from environmental catastrophes of our own making. This provokes a need for an enemy, an invisible international pervasive conspiracy for us to unite against, vilify, torture, and ultimately murder. [...] Torture by the state continues, and yes, the executions and kill lists of enemies and innocents alike. It would not be inaccurate to call this a Catholic inquisition, it is part of the same extended franchise. We have simply replaced the Church with the Corporate State and I predict that a new witchcraft will rise to confront it, with many heads.

Yet the possibility of information storage, beyond what men and governments ever had before, can make available at the touch of a button a man's total history (including remarks put on his record by his kindergarten teacher about his ability and character). And with the computer must be placed the modern scientific technical capability which exists for wholesale monitoring of telephone, cable, Telex and microwave transmissions which carry much of today's spoken and written communications. The combined use of the technical capability of listening in on all these forms of communications with the high-speed computer literally leaves no place to hide and little room for privacy.

You and I must work together to develop Nigeria to get education for our children, to have doctors, to build roads, to improve all the basic essentials.

You and I, my son, are that "below." That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.

You are constantly being trained to be heroic only in the service of your masters - only in slaughter and sacrifice and subjugation. But there is no heroism in serving your masters. Real heroism is questioning why you have masters at all. All these stories, all these fantasies, all these superpowers - are designed to steal heroism from you, to make it impossible, fantastical, remote, and unachievable - and make you useful to your masters (as a hit man, if needed). What is the opposite of this? The opposite of fantasy is philosophy. The opposite of mythology is integrity. And integrity is truth in action.

You are dealing with national security. Anything labeled a national security issie is taken out from the system. There is no due process, no lawyers. They may do with us what they wish. Fear is a government's greatest weapon. With it, they can convince a people that they need to abandon their freedom. In exchange, they get safety. Of course, you just trade one monster for another, but by the time the people realize this, it is too late. -- Excerpt from Superhero.

You are looking at this wrong. You think I hold my territory by the might of my fist. But that's not it. I hold my territory by consent of the governed. I think it is a very American concept, which might be why you never looked for it." — Adam Hauptman, Columbia Basin Pack Alpha, to Iacopo (Jacob) Bonarata, Lord of the Night (master vampire of Milan)

You cannot expect a corrupt law enforcement system to prosecute the illegal activities of corporations and their government minions.

You cannot have an agency that defends your property, which also has the right to violate your property rights at will. That's like hiring a bodyguard that you pay to beat you up randomly.

You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

You can't call your life your own: and in return you have safety, if it's worth having at the price you pay.

You don't retire from this." -Billy Johns "I know." -Melanie Adams Billy: “If you know that, then you admit that you’re trying to win an unwinnable war.” Melanie: “It’s not unwinnable, though. We’re one step away.” Billy: “From rendering yourself insane, maybe.

You can’t write novels without a touch of paranoia. I’m paranoid as an act of good citizenship, concerned about what the powerful people are up to.

You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimate it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can't find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide... And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine's numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there's a gap in the numbers.

You find your government stupid and primitive, ugly and clumsy but on the other hand you love your country very much and you find your country very beautiful? Ok then, you have one of the most common feelings in this world!

You give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders." (Larry King Live, May 11, 2009)

You govern people, you do good and bad things. If you don't have guts to do bad, then step aside.

You have the right to free speech. We, the corporate controlled government, have the right to ignore you and we choose to exercise this right.

You must realize...that the men of the Valley have built their houses and brought up their families without help from others, without a word from the Government. Their lives have been ordered from birth by the Bible. From it they took their instructions. They had no other guidance, and no other law. If it has produced hypocrites and pharisees, the fault is in the human race. We are not all angels. Our fathers upheld good conduct and rightful dealing by strictness, but it is in Man Adam to be slippery, and many are as slimy as the adder. The wonder is to me that the men of the Valley are as they are, and not barbarians at all.I was sorry for Meillyn Lewis, too. But that session of the deacons was helpful as a preventative. It was cruel, but it is more cruel to allow misconduct to flourish without check.

You know that when a utility company is going down the fantasy route, they are likely hiding some illegal activity that they are engaging in. Fabricating fictional stories to their government regulator is just one of the many illegal activities that they engage in.

You know that when ex-military personnel start assassinating their own government's agents that something funky is going on.

You mean people don't like to see hypocrisy in their leadership? Shocking.

You need brains to be a great president, not to be a president.

You need to be careful about interacting with corporate controlled governments, as killing people is part of their business model.

71 percent of the American people think that the federal government should take no more than 20 percent of anybody's paycheck no matter how much they make.

Your generation has been the target of incredible disinformation on the subject of premarital sex, which is another enticing addictive behavior to be considered. In this instance, our own government is responsible for much of the confusion. For some thirty years, federal and state programs have promoted a concept its promoters call "safe sex," which refers to the use of condoms in sexual intercourse. Billions of dollars have been spent telling young people that they can have sex—lots of really good sex—without suffering from the consequences of it. Condoms, they say, will solve all the problems.

You see, we often get noncreative leaders, people most interested in preserving their own positions. They flock around centers of power. Such centers attract people who can be corrupted. That is a more descriptive observation than to say simply that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

You take a straight tip from the stable, Cokey, if you must hate, hate the government or the people or the sea or men, but don't hate an individual person. Who's done you a real injury. Next thing you know he'll be getting into your beer like prussic acid; and blotting out your eyes like a cataract and screaming in your ears like a brain tumour and boiling round your heart like melted lead and ramping though your guts like a cancer. And a nice fool you'd look if he knew. It would make him laugh till his teeth dropped out; from old age.

800,000 Armenian deportees were actually killed... by holding the guilty accountable the government is intent on cleansing the bloody past.

2009 was a tough year, but Australia rose to the challenge of the global financial crisis. It shows what can be done when we all join together and work together, governments of all persuasions state, territory and local; businesses large and small; unions and local communities right across the nation.

70 to 80 percent of country economy is controlled by the Bolivian state, and the other percentage by the private sector. We admit that it's legal, constitutional, that the private sector is entitled to its own economy, but to ensure these profound changes that clearly this government is promoting, including profound changes in the food industry, what we are doing is an important step.

[Abdellatif Laâbi] was a poet and worked as a high school teacher; and although he hadn't broken any laws, the Moroccan government was determined to "gag" him - I use the term specifically since one of my favorite sequences of his is entitled "The Poem Beneath The Gag.

Above all, ascribe no decent motives to the federal government. Always and everywhere, it is the enemy of truth.

Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind.

Absolutely love the new campaign from the Optimum Population Trust: do your bit for addressing climate change by having fewer children - or even no children. The lifetime CO2 emissions of a UK citizen amount to 750 tonnes (the equivalent - apparently - of 620 return flights between London and New York), so the extra 10 million by which our population will rise between now and 2074 will, over their lifetimes, emit around 7½ billion tonnes of CO2..."births averted" is probably the most single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using

Absolute power can only be supported by error, ignorance and prejudice.

Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.

Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation.

According to government auditors, the stimulus money is being held up because there aren't enough government workers to oversee the spending. So follow me, in other words, government workers who aren't there are needed to spend money we don't have to create jobs that don't exist.

According to the Tax Foundation, the average American worker works 127 days of the year just to pay his taxes. That means that government owns 36 percent of the average American's output-which is more than feudal serfs owed the robber barons. That 36 percent is more than the average American spends on food, clothing and housing. In other words, if it were not for taxes, the average American's living standard would at least double.

A citizen walking through the airport today is bombarded with 1984-style propaganda messages that are designed to make us fear some amorphous threat and also be suspicious of others. The government designs these messages to make us feel dependent and heavily lorded over in every aspect of our lives. These messages are becoming ever more pervasive, hitting us even in grocery stores when we are shopping.

A claim for equality of material position can be met only by a government with totalitarian powers.

A conservative government survives essentially by dampening expectations and subduing hopes. Conservatism is basically pessimistic, reformism is basically optimistic.

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

A constitution defines and limits the powers of the government it creates. It therefore follows, as a natural and also a logical result, that the governmental exercise of any power not authorized by the constitution is an assumed power, and therefore illegal.

Acquire a government over your ideas, that they may come down when they are called, and depart when they are bidden.

A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government; and government without a constitution is power without a right. All power exercised over a nation, must have some beginning. It must be either delegated, or assumed. There are not other sources. All delegated power is trust, and all assumed power is usurpation. Time does not alter the nature and quality of either.

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not sufficient capital to form a corporation.Most government is by the rich for the rich. Government comprises a large part of the organized injustice in any society, ancient or modern.Civil government, insofar as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, and for the defence of those who have property against those who have none.

A critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy. The press must be free from state interference. It must have the economic strength to stand up to the blandishments of government officials. It must have sufficient independence from vested interests to be bold and inquiring without fear or favour. It must enjoy the protection of the constitution, so that it can protect our rights as citizens.