Quotes about Government

Years ago, a well-known political writer, Isabel Paterson, was talking to a businessman outraged by some government action. She urged him to speak up for his principles. "I agree with you totally," he said, "but I'm not in a position right now to do it." "The only position required," she replied, "is vertical.

Every political system is based on some code of ethics.

You don't have to worry about the intellectuals, Wesley. Just put a few of them on the government payroll and send them out to preach precisely the sort of thing Mr. Kinnan mentioned: that the blame rests on the victims. Give them moderately comfortable salaries and extremely loud titles—and they'll forget their copyrights and do a better job for you than whole squads of enforcement officers.

Conservative or liberal, we are all constitutionalists.

I believe in the Constitution and I will obey the Constitution of the United States. We're not going to use signing statements as a way of doing an end run around congress.

The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works

The government was taking money, jobs, college slots, and status away from hardworking, deserving people like us and handing it all to people like them—those who didn't share our values, who didn't work as hard as we did, the kind of people whose problems were of their own making.

It's like moving-in day on a college campus, except a large percentage of the people involved are middle-aged, in suits, and, along with you, charged with running the most powerful nation on earth.

There were those who argued that government should not interject itself into civil society, that no law could force white people to associate with blacks. Upon hearing these arguments, Dr. King replied, "It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also.

Conservatives may be right when they argue that the government should not try to determine executive pay packages. But conservatives should at least be willing to speak out against unseemly behavior in corporate boardrooms with the same moral force, the same sense of outrage that they direct against dirty rap lyrics.

Still, for both policy and political reasons, I felt that progressives couldn't afford to ignore economics. Those of us who believed in the government's ability to solve big problems had an obligation to pay attention to the real-world impact of our decisions and not just trust in the goodness of our intentions.

The fruit vendor's anguish set off weeks of nationwide demonstrations against the Tunisian government, and on January 14, 2011, Ben Ali and his family fled to Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, similar protests, made up mostly of young people, were beginning to happen in Algeria, Yemen, Jordan, and Oman, the first flickers of what became known as the Arab Spring.