Government Quotes - Page 388

In the twentieth century the number of people killed by their own governments under authoritarian regimes is four times the number killed in all this century's wars combined.

The net poses a fundamental threat not only to the authority of the government, but to all authority, because it permits people to organize, think, and influence one another without any institutional supervision whatsoever.

I can describe to you the taste of government cheese.

I can imagine [the government] trying to tell Steven Spielberg 'We need 50 different cuts of your movie for each state.' It will screw us up in a real way.

I have more government than I want, more government than I need, more government than I can afford.

Of course, corporations and governments have a right to something for their money. They pay the wages. But they don't have the ethical right to literally purchase the copyright of a citizen's potential contribution to society. In a democracy they should not have the legal right to silence the quasi-totality of the functioning élite in order to satisfy a managerial taste for control and secrecy.

The most powerful force possessed by the individual citizen is her own government. ... Government is the only organized mechanism that makes possible that level of shared disinterest known as the public good.

We ought to start running the government like a private-sector business. I have that ability as CEO of our companies. I have line item vetoes, and if I didn't, we'd probably be out of business by now.

The great problem of legislation is, so to organize the civil government of a community... that in the operation of human institutions upon social action, self-love and social may be made the same.

The political system of the United States is essentially extra-European. To stand in firm and cautious independence of all entanglement in the European system has been a cardinal point of their policy under every administration of their government from the peace of 1783 to this day...Every year's experience rivets it more deeply in the principles and opinions of the nation.

Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result.

It seems strange to make a priori arguments about the relative performance of governments and the markets in health care when there is so much empirical evidence.

Governments steal from citizens through taxes and through the subterfuge of monetizing their own IOUs.

In the north east, there, they have had quite a bit of government offices moving in. It's not a new policy.

He made an enormous contribution to British politics in opposition and in government [on Robin Cook]

Nobody - myself included - believes that we could ever achieve total information awareness. But the government needs to set goals and long-range objectives. Total information awareness is a good goal.

The thing is, Obama is right that it would be a calamity for the government to default on its debt by not meeting its obligations. Such a thing has never happened and can't be allowed to happen.

You know, you just know, that after the president goes out there and announces he wants to make community college free for all Americans - as though anything government does is 'free' - or is unilaterally and unconstitutionally legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, he comes back to the offices, pulls out the presidential BlackBerry, and gleefully follows along as the Right goes completely ape over these wild policy decisions.

Romney is right that the Obama vision is too centered on government. But his is too centered on the promotion of business and wealth creation at the expense of everything else.

We have an extreme rightwing government in Britain, although it's called the Labour government. That's confused a lot of people, but it's confusing them less and less.

Most libertarians are worried about government but not worried about business. I think we need to be worrying about business in exactly the same way we are worrying about government.

As a matter of constitutional tradition, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we presume that governmental regulation of the content of speech is more likely to interfere with the free exchange of ideas than to encourage it. The interest in encouraging freedom of expression in a democratic society outweighs any theoretical but unproven benefit of censorship.

Our democratic values also include - and our national security demands - open and transparent government. Some information obviously needs to be protected. And since his first days in office, President Obama has worked to strike the proper balance between the security the American people deserve and the openness our democratic society expects.

Government protection should be thrown around every wild grove and forest on the mountains, as it is around every private orchard, and the trees in public parks. To say nothing of their value as fountains of timber, they are worth infinitely more than all the gardens and parks of towns.

As the contest proceeded, public interest increased and the entire country watched to see which company would win the big government subsidies through the mountains.