Government Quotations

Quotations relating to government.

Showing 37 through 72 of 81 quotations in this category.

"There's nothing wrong with patriotism, but too often we think just waving a flag and following submissively along with what our leaders tell us to do is enough. It's not. It's not even close."

-willrich (on the web)

"You cannot have an integrated world and have your say all the time. America can lead the world towards that, but we cannot dominate and run the world in that direction. There is a big difference."

-President Bill Clinton

"I hope you are alive and unsentimental enough to look honestly at yourselves as American citizens and say that it is insulting to you and your relatives and your fellow citizens to let Osama bin Laden so dazzle and possess our president and our government and our society that he and his war can so disrupt our economy and our way of life."

-National security expert William M. Arkin

"I have never understood why the politicians who are most eager to send soldiers into harm's way are always depicted as their most ardent friends."

-Joe Conason

"We cannot continue to have trade policy in this country that does not take into account conditions of the workers and the environment. We have all sorts of protections in our trade laws to protect intellectual property. We have all sorts of rules in our trade laws to protect compact discs. If we had one-quarter of the same rights for a human being as we do for compact discs, we'd see a huge breakthrough in trade policy."

-Amy Dean

"The Dems' 2004 'vision,' despite all the campaign slogans to the contrary, was Anything But Bush. And our strategy wasn't, 'It's the economy, stupid' or even, 'It's Iraq, stupid,' but rather, 'Isn't Bush stupid?' That was our 'vision.'"

-ZZ Packer

"In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. ... You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it."

-Abraham Lincoln

"There is no bad economic turn a conservative cannot do unto his buddy in the working class, as long as cultural solidarity has been cemented over a beer."

-Thomas Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?

"As quietly as possible a "shadow government" has been set up all around us, my friend. Its foundation is not the Constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers. It has all the tools to be an absolute tyranny. Those behind it (on both sides of the aisle) who crave power continue to move towards it, while we are distracted by so many other goings on."

-Jeff Head @ FreeRepublic.com

"Programs such as Medicare, public sanitation, and biomedical research bought you longer life and better health. Maybe, instead of asking what your country owes you at 65, you should ask what you owe your country."

-William Saletan

"What's weird is that all the best information we have about what's being done in our name with our tax money is due to leaks. It doesn't feel like democracy to me."

-timeOday, Slashdot.org

"Politics has become a game of meaningless, mindless battles, conducted by unscrupulous methods and people, designed to transform even the most serious policy debates into sport."

-Al Gore, May 2006

"It is one of history's great tragedies that American conservatism, born in part in resistance to Soviet torture, should end by endorsing it in America, by Americans."

-Andrew Sullivan

"This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence."

-Milton Friedman

"Civil disobedience, that’s not our problem. Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

-Howard Zinn

"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac."

-George Orwell

"Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth."

-Lucy Parsons

"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."

-John Maynard Keynes

"Not in our day, but at no distant one, we may shake a rod over the heads of all, which may make the stoutest of them tremble. But I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power, the greater it will be."

-Thomas Jefferson

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."

-Dom Helder Camara, Brazilian archbishop

"I'm not fond of ideologies. I don't like it when people have answers before they know the question."

-Peter Moskos

"That government is best which governs the least, because its people discipline themselves."

-Thomas Jefferson

"Anyone who tells you that one political party has a monopoly on the best defense of our nation is committing a fraud on the American people."

-Gen. Wesley Clark

"The job of the president of the United States is not to love his wife; it's to manage a wide range of complicated issues."

-Matthew Yglesias

"The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself."

-Daniel Patrick Moynihan

""If you buy a loaf of bread from the 7-11, you get a written receipt. Why can't we get a receipt when choosing the leader of the free world?""

-Bartcop.com, on voting machines with no paper trail

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

-H. L. Mencken, in the Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920

"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia."

-George Orwell

"One of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen."

-Writer Matt Taibbi, on the 2004 US presidential race

"See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime."

-Frederic Bastiat

"I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in forty-seven, if I had known it would become the American Gestapo."

-Harry Truman, 1961

"We currently have a government planning to go to Mars, heal broken marriages, and build bridges to nowhere - and also one that cannot wage a war competently, cannot respond to a hurricane adequately, and cannot enforce borders. Is it too much to ask that it get the basic things right before embarking on grandiose schemes?"

-Andrew Sullivan

"Dost thou not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"

-Count Oxenstierna

"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich, as well as the poor, to sleep under the bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

-Anatole France

"If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too."

-Katherine Anne Porter

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

-George Orwell