Government Quotes - Page 319

If our government servants had to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act as they have forced all of American business to do, they would be in jail.

Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.

We're a very religious country; the government's secular.

I'm just not sure I trust the federal government not to trample on civil liberties.

The same Constitution that allows her the right, if she wants to, to sit there and say nothing, allows these groups the right to petition their government for redress.

It is America, I don't want the government trying to control more of my life. I want less government control, and I think there are too many government regulations, laws and taxes on the books.

Government does best when it helps people help themselves. Human dignity is found not in a handout but in being able to do for one's self.

It is quite possible that we will soon come to live under some sort of global despotism, enlightened or not. This is not a nice prospect. And there is only one way of avoiding that this happens: to establish a global democracy. And it is not too late to strive for such a democracy, of a straightforward populist nature, where people on the globe elect a world parliament, which in turn elects a world government.

Government never falls lower than when decent people dutifully excuse their leaders' sins.

We're emotionally unfit. We expect things to be given to us that other generations had to earn. We think we're supposed to get homes with no money down and be supported by the government if we're unemployed.

Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we're interested in is talking about when government doesn't work.

The government gave me enough money to go to acting school.

Clinton's successor in the White House, George W. Bush, was committed to expanding government spending for faith-based initiatives.

I propose that the government should get out of the business of marrying people and, instead, only give legal status to civil unions.

Getting the government to put money into social programs run by religious institutions is a practice that started during the Clinton years, when Bill Clinton advocated the AmeriCorps program.

While I can see how the government has, at times, wasted taxpayers' money, and I can admit that too often its programs are ineffective, I also can see the good that government does.

When there is conflict between what God requires and the demands of the government, each of us has an important decision to make concerning taxes.

The claim that the Government made that there were 21 measures in it is wrong. We said we wanted to wait till we saw the bill because we didn't to trust that it would be as they described and it's turned out we were exactly right for saying that. The Government has been entirely deceptive with this. And if their first action is to lie to the Australian people about what was meant to be their centrepiece bill, that really tells you want the [Malcolm] Turnbull Government's going to be about.

With a close parliament, if the Government wants to get a good outcome for the nation, they can't play a game of lying to the public about what's in their own legislation. They can't do that.

The Government in their own terms, for example, they banked the income for the backpackers' tax. But they had a process attached to the backpackers' tax of review that they wanted to go through. What the Government's saying now with this bill is any process, any detail, any reinvestment that Labor had as part of its package, we're meant to ignore all of that and it's only the cut part of it that we're meant to be committed to.

The challenge we've got is that the Government does not have a working majority. They don't.

There's a huge wave of anti-establishment feeling. There's an enormous amount of anger. And it's collapsing governments and political movements across the world right now.

There are big questions about the sort of skills you need in modern government today. You put politicians in charge of billions of dollars with absolutely no training and very little support system around them. It's an extraordinary thing.

Times are tough but they are tough because the government is trying to do the right thing, whether on public service reform, education, health, anti-social behaviour and welfare, or in counter-terrorism.

So much of politics is about the daily grind of political business: the people to see, the myriad different facets of government, the remorseless agenda of this part of the media or that.