940 private quotes tagged government

“Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.”— Adlai E. Stevenson

“Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.”— Lord Acton

“Americans cannot maintain their essential faith in government if there are two Americas, in which the private sector's work subsidizes the disproportionate benefits of this new public sector elite.”— Mortimer Zuckerman

“There are no adequate substitutes for father, mother, and children bound together in a loving commitment to nurture and protect. No government, no matter how well-intentioned, can take the place of the family in the scheme of things.”— Gerald R. Ford

“Left-wing politicians take away your liberty in the name of children and of fighting poverty, while right-wing politicians do it in the name of family values and fighting drugs. Either way, government gets bigger and you become less free.”— Harry Browne

“Well, I have a CBE and I accepted it with glee because it's not bestowed on you by the royal family, it's not bestowed on you by the government, you have to be nominated by the public.”— Rod Stewart

“I'm very, very concerned about the Bush presidency. I'm worried about the kinds of cuts in domestic programs that mean something to a lot of people, including members of my family, who depend on certain things from the government.”— Sarah Jessica Parker

“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency.”— Douglas MacArthur

“Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result.”— Andrew Jackson

“I believe the American people have a genuine and justifiable fear of government intrusion in what they instinctively know is going to be an ever more intrusive world.”— Joe Biden

“Americans need never fear their government because of the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation.”— Gouverneur Morris

“Canadians know that the promise of a recession didn't happen because of anything we did here. If you look at all the causes of the recession, problems in mortgage markets, the problems in the banking sector, the problems in government finance in countries like Greece, none of those problems were in present Canada.”— Stephen Harper

“The vast amount of waste and sheer stupidity in government - from the Pentagon to the Food and Drug Administration - could fill committee agendas for years.”— Tom Coburn

“Back in 1983, the United States government approved the release of the first genetically modified organism. In this case, it was a bacteria that prevents frost on food crops.”— Jeremy Rifkin

“We're adults. We're the ones who should teach the kids what's good to eat. I don't think the government should ever regulate what we eat at home, but we're feeding them in school with tax dollars. Quite frankly, if my tax dollars are being spent to feed kids, I'd rather feed them better food.”— Tom Colicchio

“A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.”— Frank Lloyd Wright

“What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.”— Thomas Sowell

“There is only one kind of freedom and that's individual liberty. Our lives come from our creator and our liberty comes from our creator. It has nothing to do with government granting it.”— Ron Paul

“I was ecstatic they re-named 'French Fries' as 'Freedom Fries'. Grown men and women in positions of power in the U.S. government showing themselves as idiots.”— Johnny Depp

“Freedom of expression - in particular, freedom of the press - guarantees popular participation in the decisions and actions of government, and popular participation is the essence of our democracy.”— Corazon Aquino

“Institutions - government, churches, industries, and the like - have properly no other function than to contribute to human freedom and in so far as they fail, on the whole, to perform this function, they are wrong and need reconstruction.”— Charles Horton Cooley

“Great research universities must insist on independence from government and on the exercise of academic freedom.”— Alan Dershowitz

“Well, I'm a libertarian conservative, so I believe in limited government/maximum individual freedom.”— John Bolton

“Criticism of government finds sanctuary in several portions of the 1st Amendment. It is part of the right of free speech. It embraces freedom of the press.”— Hugo Black

“My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.”— Jimmy Wales