Criticize Government Quotes

In a country where people are afraid of criticizing the government, many things must be going horrible! In such countries people must know that a society of cowards will always be remembered as a society of honourless people! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

If a media is not criticizing the government, then that media is not a media but just a clown of the government! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The science of government is only a science of combinations, of applications, and of exceptions, according to times, places and circumstances. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

It is what we prevent, rather than what we do that counts most in Government. ~ William Lyon Mackenzie King

I have been lucky that some critics joined the mob in loving something I've done, or in appreciating it. I've been lucky. But most of the critics don't like what the people like. I think they have a very strange job, and they are meant to criticize. ~ Mel Brooks

The Founders believed, and the Conservative agrees, in the dignity of the individual; that we, as human beings, have a right to live, live freely, and pursue that which motivates us not because man or some government says so, but because these are God-given natural rights. ~ Mark R. Levin

I applaud strong government, but not overweening government sustained by cronies, ciphers and a personality cult. ~ Margaret Thatcher

When the power, prestige, and financial support of government is placed behind a particular religious belief, the indirect coercive pressure upon religious minorities to conform to the prevailing officially approved religion is plain. ~ Hugo Black

The anti-slavery party contends that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States. ~ Laurence M. Keitt

I don't think we can go back to the old days. But I think that what the government needs to do is it needs to make sure that the pricing is fair, that you don't have monopolies out there, so that people don't have a chance to compete fairly. ~ Dan Glickman

This Government has found occasion to express, in a friendly spirit, but with much earnestness, to the Government of the Czar, its serious concern because of the harsh measures now being enforced against the Hebrews in Russia. ~ Benjamin Harrison

There is much the government can do and should do to improve the environment. But even more important is the individual who plants a tree or cleans a corner of neglect. For it is the individual who himself benefits, and also protects a heritage of beauty for his children and future generations. ~ Lady Bird Johnson

And that's how I wrote to NICAP, but then later, just very soon after that, like three weeks later, we started getting phone calls from government agents. ~ Betty Hill

Overwhelming the majority of European citizens are unhappy with the social deal they get, yes; and that is why they are so angry with their governments. Because they want more, much more! They couldn't care less that their benefits, salaries and other privileges, have been, for decades and centuries 'subsidized' by the plunder of other parts of the planet; that they are paid for by blood. ~ Andre Vltchek

I think the Nobel Prize helps for a number of reasons. Number one, if I can be frank, there is these people will feel by getting a Nobel Prize that I'm one of them, that it is possible to contribute on the world map of science and technology. And the other thing also which I'm hoping for is that the government in Egypt is willing and interested in promoting science and technology and this is an ideal time now to be able to do something. ~ Ahmed H. Zewail

Of course, in the U.S. the government and politics are gaining more and more ground lately at the cost of the law. The government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy. ~ Mohamedou Ould Slahi

This is crossing the Rubicon, after which there will be no more sovereign states in Europe with fully-fledged governments and parliaments which represent legitimate interests of their citizens, but only one State will remain. Basic things will be decided by a remote 'federal government' in Brussels and, for example, Czech citizens will be only a tiny particle whose voice and influence will be almost zero ... We are against a European superstate. ~ Vaclav Klaus

Good government cannot be found on the bargain-counter. We have seen samples of bargain-counter government in the past when low tax rates were secured by increasing the bonded debt for current expenses or refusing to keep our institutions up to the standard in repairs, extensions, equipment, and accommodations. I refuse, and the Republican Party refuses, to endorse that method of sham and shoddy economy. ~ Calvin Coolidge

Negativity takes no imagination. It's far easier to criticize someone's decisions after they make them than to propose better ones beforehand. ~ Urijah Faber

I do not believe in the government of the lash, if any one of you ever expects to whip your children again, I want you to have a photograph taken of yourself when you are in the act, with your face red with vulgar anger, and the face of the little child, with eyes swimming in tears and the little chin dimpled with fear, like a piece of water struck by a sudden cold wind. Have the picture taken. If that little child should die, I cannot think of a sweeter way to spend an autumn afternoon than to go out to the cemetery, when the maples are clad in tender gold, and little scarlet runners are coming, like poems of regret, from the sad heart of the earth - and sit down upon the grave and look at that photograph, and think of the flesh now dust that you beat. I tell you it is wrong; it is no way to raise children! Make your home happy. Be honest with them. Divide fairly with them in everything. ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

Hand in hand with freedom of speech goes the power to be heard, to share in the decisions of government which shape men's lives. ~ Robert Kennedy

Every Indian outbreak that I have ever known has resulted from broken promises and broken treaties by the government. ~ Buffalo Bill

When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. ~ Jimmy Reid

I'm serious. I've got to get people to realize that the government is full of it. Republicans and Democrats want to argue over stuff that's not important, like gay marriage or the war in Iraq or illegal immigration ... When I run - if I run - we're going to talk about real issues like improving our schools, cleaning up our neighborhoods of drugs and crime and making Alabama a better place for all people. ~ Charles Barkley

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

Improving the quality of life for people of this country is perhaps the most important duty of Government ~ John Prescott

Because many of us make mistakes that can have bad consequences, some intellectuals believe that it is the role of government to intervene and make some of our decisions for us. From what galaxy government is going to hire creatures who do not make mistakes is a question they leave unanswered. ~ Thomas Sowell

I have great respect for the Taiwanese. They have done an extraordinary job. But it was not a sustainable position to say that the legitimate government of China resides in Taiwan, which at that time didn't have much contact with the mainland. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Something like missionary reductionism has happened to the internet with the rise of web 2.0. The strangeness is being leached away by the mush-making process. Individual web pages as they first appeared in the early 1990S had the flavor of personhood. MySpace preserved some of that flavor, though a process of regularized formatting had begun. Facebook went further, organizing people into multiple-choice identities, while Wikipedia seeks to erase point of view entirely.

If a church or government were doing these things, it would feel authoritarian, but when technologists are the culprits, we seem hip, fresh, and inventive. People will accept ideas presented in technological form that would be abhorrent in any other form. It is utterly strange to hear my many old friends in the world of digital culture claim to be the true sons of the Renaissance without realizing that using computers to reduce individual expression is a primitive, retrograde activity, no matter how sophisticated your tools are. ~ Jaron Lanier

I guess I'm just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws. ~ S.J Perelman

Our own government has become our enemy. ~ Chuck Baldwin

The government will pay certain farmers to not grow corn. Wow. Where's my check? That'd be great. "Hey, what do you do for a living?" "Well, I don't grow corn. Get up at the crack of noon, make sure there's no corn growing. I'm gonna get up early tomorrow. And not plow. You know, we used to not grow tomatoes-but there's more money in not growing corn." ~ Brian Regan

A bad government cannot only be called as a 'bad' government; the real adjective should be this: Enemy! Yes, bad government is a real enemy for the country it governs, an enemy within! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I'm not a smuggler, I'm a missionary. I have chosen to be obedient and not turn away from danger. So when government says, 'No!', I said, 'wait a minute', God said, 'Go!', so I didn't listen to the 'No!' ~ Andrew Van Der Bijl

Frequent punishments are always a sign of weakness or laziness on the part of a government. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. ~ Timothy McVeigh

As soon as the hijackers' names had been publicly released, Acxiom had searched its massive data banks, which take up five acres in tiny Conway, Arkansas. And it had found some very interesting data on the perpetrators of the attacks. In fact, it turned out, Acxiom knew more about eleven of the nineteen hijackers than the entire U.S. government did - including their past and current addresses and the names of their housemates. We may never know what was in the files Acxiom gave the government (though one of the executives told a reporter that Acxiom's information had led to deportations and indictments). But here's what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are right-handed or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) … the list of data points is about 1,500 items long. ~ Eli Pariser

Politkovskaya was a known critic of the administration. For this reason, one cannot rule out the possibility that someone would want to blame the government for the murder. ~ Alexander Lebedev

Of course the no-government ethics will meet with at least as many objections as the no-capital economics. Our minds have been so nurtured in prejudices as to the providential functions of government that anarchist ideas must be received with distrust. Our whole education, from childhood to the grave, nurtures the belief in the necessity of a government and its beneficial effects. Systems of philosophy have been elaborated to support this view; history has been written from this standpoint; theories of law have been circulated and taught for the same purpose. All politics are based on the same principle, each politician saying to people he wants to support him: "Give me the governmental power; I will, I can, relieve you from the hardships of your present life." All our education is permeated with the same teachings. We may open any book of sociology, history, law, or ethics: everywhere we find government, its organisation, its deeds, playing so prominent a part that we grow accustomed to suppose that the State and the political men are everything; that there is nothing behind the big statesmen. The same teachings are daily repeated in the Press. Whole columns are filled up with minutest records of parliamentary debates, of movements of political persons. And, while reading these columns, we too often forget that besides those few men whose importance has been so swollen up as to overshadow humanity, there is an immense body of men - mankind, in fact - growing and dying, livin ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Americans should not have to wonder if their government is actively looking to subvert them or their political views. We live in a nation where respect for differing beliefs and a vibrant political discourse play an important role in shaping our government. ~ Mike Turner

The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system. ~ Jay Wright Forrester

And because my employers agree with me, and they're the government, you're outvoted. ~ Charles Stross

You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream
the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order
or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. ~ Ronald Reagan