Local Government Quotes

I shall work with Congress, civil society groups and local government executives who are convinced that charter changes are needed to enable the country to surmount the unprecedented challenges of the 21st century. ~ Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

When people believe that the local government and economy serve their needs. There is little desire to protest. ~ Auliq Ice

The capacity of the commonwealth government created under the local constitution to exercise governmental powers in local affairs is like that of local government in the states of the union in regard to non-federal affairs at the local level. ~ Dick Thornburgh

At the local government level, policies must be championed to increase the number of instructional hours in our schools as well as make the process of admission easier in order to enroll and keep a higher number of students in class. ~ Shaheen Mistri

Every family in America knows they have to do a budget. Every small business in America knows they have to do a budget. Every local government, every state, knows they have to do a budget. ~ John Boehner

Pakistan needs to have decentralisation and a good local government system. ~ Imran Khan

The user of land should not be allowed to acquire rights of indefinite duration for single payments. For efficiency, for adequate revenue and for justice, every user of land should be required to make an annual payment to the local government equal to the current rental value of the land that he or she prevents others from using. ~ Robert Solow

During the election in 1989, there was the first Soviet election with alternative candidates to local government. I myself arranged special training for them. ~ Anatoly Chubais

The objection to an aristocracy is that it is a priesthood without a god. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The seemingly omnipresent storm clouds hanging over the Constitution often make it hard to find a silver lining. Every day, the front page of The Drudge Report is littered with stories of government assaults on our civil liberties - from local government officials all the way up to the Oval Office. ~ Bob Barr

What we need is not more Federal government, but better local government. ~ Calvin Coolidge

No doubt, some of the champions of local government hoped to preserve such unsavory local customs as slavery or the local rule of a small group of privileged men, but many of the defenders of local government argued honestly that the states presented the best hope of securing liberty. Liberty, in the eighteenth century, meant not simply liberty from some intrusive outside power. It meant the active exercise of control over one's life, the possession of power in one's own hands. It meant government small enough and close enough to home to be directly accountable and responsive. It meant self-government, not government handed over to some remote rulers. Strictly understood, the principle of local self-government meant a share of power more or less equal to everyone else's share of power, a citizenry more or less equal in wealth and status, not one dominated by one small group or another; that is to say, it meant democracy ~ Charles L. Mee Jr.

So the years passed and everyone grew old and Nell's husband died and Hilda grew to be a large, angry sort of woman very high up in local government. When Nell was eighty-four Hilda retired and they went to live at a sea-side place where Hilda had had meaningful holidays during the menopause with a woman called Audrey, now dead. ~ Jane Gardam

Internationalism is in any case hostile to democracy ... .The only purely popular government is local, and founded on local knowledge. The citizens can rule the city because they know the city; but it will always be an exceptional sort of citizen who has or claims the right to rule over ten cities, and these remote and altogether alien cities ... To make all politics cosmopolitan is to create an aristocracy of globe-trotters. If your political outlook really takes in the Cannibal Islands, you depend of necessity upon a superior and picked minority of the people who have been to the Cannibal Islands; or rather of the still smaller and more select minority who have come back. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The Canary Islands offer special incentives to companies looking at potential filming locations, so it was only logical for me to help the local government make connections with major U.S. film studios like Universal, Fox, Sony, Disney, Paramount, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, Viacom, Comcast, HBO, Netflix, Warner Brothers etc. ~ James Costos

Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater. ~ Gordon S. Wood

With these digital tools, citizens and their officials can revolutionize local government, making it more responsive, transparent, and cost-effective than it has ever been. ~ Stephen Goldsmith

Some land surveyors delve into land development advocacy, working with local government on behalf of clients in order to facilitate progress on a project. Others stick to strictly surveying. The approach depends on the individual firm and the needs of the local area. ~ Mark Mason

In some of the middle colonies the towns and counties were both active and had a relation with each other which was the forerunner of the present system of local government in the Western States. ~ Albert Bushnell Hart

For the ANC to cry 'sabotage' the night before crucial local government elections shows just how desperate they are to disguise their incompetence and mismanagement. ~ Helen Zille

Bosses are no more inevitable in state and local governments than dictators are in national governments. They will arise and prosper, nevertheless, if true believers of democracy - citizens devoted to the democratic ideals - do not constantly oppose them. ~ Charles Edison

State and local government, with financial support from the federal government, should offer a program to educate and train foster children for employment and provide them with financial assistance, as needed, until they reach age 21. ~ Charles Bass

When justices seize authority from the other branches of the federal government, as well as state and local governments, under the rubric of judicial review, that's tyranny. ~ Mark Levin

A vast army of government employees [Central, state and local government] of around 20 million are taken care by the remaining 380 million of the workforce, which also meets the extortionate and rent-seeking demands of the government employees. ~ R. Vaidyanathan

We have been getting ready to recycle more e-waste by investing in infrastructure, providing grants to local government and working with industry. ~ Jay Weatherill

We are reorganizing how we work with state and local governments to make sure that we are not prioritizing families [for deportation], and you are gonna see, I think, a substantial change even as the case works its way through the courts. ~ Barack Obama

And I just think that we're at a point in our economic life here in our state - and - and, candidly, across the country, where increased taxes is just the wrong way to go. The people of our state are not convinced that state government, county government, local government has done all they can with the money we already give them, rather than the money that we have before. ~ Chris Christie

There is no easy solution to the problem of political ignorance. But we can significantly mitigate it by making more of our decisions by "voting with our feet" and fewer at the ballot box. Two types of foot voting have important informational advantages over ballot box voting. The first is when we vote with our feet in the private sector, by choosing which products to buy or which civil society organizations to join. The other is choosing what state or local government to live under in a federal system - a decision often influenced by the quality of those jurisdictions' public policy. ~ Ilya Somin

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

We need to find a way of having a conversation across the parties on how you fund local government. ~ Johann Lamont

[M]ore Americans work for federal, state or local government than work in any form of manufacturing. We crossed that Rubicon about 10 years ago. ~ Ann Coulter

Building sustainable cities - and a sustainable future - will need open dialogue among all branches of national, regional and local government. And it will need the engagement of all stakeholders - including the private sector and civil society, and especially the poor and marginalized. ~ Ban Ki-moon

The Salem [witch] trials…can be seen as an example of the propensity of the American people to be convulsed by spasms of self-righteous rage against enemies, real or imaginary, of their society and way of living. Hence the parallels later drawn between Salem in 1692 and the "Red Scare" of 1919-20, Senator McCarthy's hunt for Communists in the early 1950's, the Watergate hysteria of 1973-74, and the Irangate hunt of the 1980s. What strikes the historian, however, is not just the intensity of the self-delusion in the summer of 1692, by no means unusual for the age, but the speed of the recovery from it in the autumn, and the anxiety of the local government and society to confess wrongdoing, to make reparation and search for the truth. That indeed is uncommon in any age. In the late 17th century it was perhaps more remarkable than the hysteria itself and a good augury for America's future as a humane and truth-seeking commonwealth. The rule of law did indeed break down, but it was restored with promptness and penitence. ~ Paul Johnson

I think that the press has a duty and an obligation to report on local government, state government, federal government - to be aggressive, to do its job. And its job is to report on whatever it's covering. ~ Mark McKinnon

There are 10,000 local governments in the state of New York. Ten thousand! Town, village, lighting district, water district, sewer district, a special district to count the other districts in case you missed a district. ~ Andrew Cuomo

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach. ~ Zephyr Teachout

As a former mayor, I know that local governments must have control over land use decisions. ~ Elton Gallegly

At the end of the day, the government, local government all bow to public pressure. ~ Ma Jun

There's much more we can be doing in Parliament, we could be giving more power back to people at local government level, through local referendums. ~ Theresa May

I enjoy getting things done. My philosophy is the edge, the edge of something. There's where we have to go in local government, in not only the philosophy but the creativity in people around you. They have to go to the edge. ~ Richard M. Daley

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. ~ Bobby Scott

Her job at the local government bureau also meant that she had access to farm produce managed by her office. ~ Hyeonseo Lee

The key difference between foot voting and ballot box voting is that foot voters don't have the same incentive to be rationally ignorant as ballot box voters do. In fact, they have strong incentives to seek out useful information. They also have much better incentives to objectively evaluate what they do learn. Unlike political fans, foot voters know they will pay a real price if they do a poor job of evaluating the information they get...
The informational advantages of foot voting over ballot box voting strengthen the case for limiting and decentralizing government. The more decentralized government is, the more issues can be decided through foot voting. It is usually much easier to vote with your feet against a local government than a state government, and much easier to do it against a state than against the federal government.
It is also usually easier to foot vote in the private sector than the public. A given region is likely to have far more private planned communities and other private sector organizations than local governments. Choosing among the former usually requires far less in the way of moving costs than choosing among the latter.
Reducing the size of government could also alleviate the problem of ignorance by making it easier for rationally ignorant voters to monitor its activities. A smaller, less complicated government is easier to keep track of. ~ Ilya Somin

Gordon Ramsay grew up in a tourist town, Stratford-Upon-Avon, but in a part tourists don't visit - a council estate: a concrete bunker subsidized by the local government, synonymous with deprivation and blight. ~ Bill Buford

I am not about to let the people who so mismanaged the state budget now try to manage local government. ~ Jim Doyle

I think it true that, you know, sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and, actually, I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes, that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied. ~ David Cameron

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress. ~ Mary Augusta Ward

Congress seems to thrive on breaking promises and passing unfunded mandates down to local government. It's really just a matter of priorities. ~ Jared Polis

In Memory of BPP Comrades Fred Hampton & Mark Clark, both assassinated by the US Government via the state and local government of Chicago, Illinois, December 4, 1969. ~ Emory Douglas

These children should be enrolled in Independent Living programs designed by state and local governments to prepare them to enter the workplace, or attend college, and successfully manage their lives. ~ Charles Bass

As more and more women, men and young people raise their voices and become active in local government, and more local leaders take action for the safety of women and girls, change happens. ~ Michelle Bachelet

The poor don't live in functional market economies as the rest of us do, but in political economies where corruption and broken systems extend from local government to moneylenders. ~ Jacqueline Novogratz

The only way to make government more efficient is to make it smaller and to make it more local. ~ James Lankford

Under the constitution, there was never meant to be a federal police force. Even an FBI limited only to investigations was not accepted until this century. Yet today, fueled by the federal government's misdirected war on drugs, radical environmentalism, and the aggressive behavior of the nanny state, we have witnessed the massive buildup of a virtual army of armed regulators prowling the States where they have no legal authority. The sacrifice of individual responsibility and the concept of local government by the majority of American citizens has permitted the army of bureaucrats to thrive. ~ Ron Paul

A Local Government Stationery Store is something to behold. It's like walking through the back of a cupboard into a really dull Narnia. ~ Sally Phillips

We had Americans gather together in prayer, before they went to stand before the federal government ... that prayed for peace, that there wouldn't be confrontation. ~ Matt Shea

Judged by every standard which history has applied to Governments, the Soviet Government of Russia is one of the worst tyrannies that has ever existed in the world. It accords no political rights. It rules by terror. It punishes political opinions. It suppresses free speech. It tolerates no newspapers but its own. It persecutes Christianity with a zeal and a cunning never equalled since the times of the Roman Emperors. It is engaged at this moment in trampling down the peoples of Georgia and executing their leaders by hundreds. ~ Winston Churchill

This was a particularly spectacular example of the German campaign to gather forced labor in the East, which had begun with the Poles of the General Government, and spread to Ukraine before reaching this bloody climax in Belarus. By the end of the war, some eight million foreigners from the East, most of them Slavs, were working in the Reich. It was a rather perverse result, even by the standards of Nazi racism: German men went abroad and killed millions of "subhumans," only to import millions of other "subhumans" to do the work in Germany that the German men would have been doing themselves - had they not been abroad killing "subhumans." The net effect, setting aside the mass killing abroad, was that Germany became more of a Slavic land than it had ever been in history. (The perversity would reach its extreme in the first months of 1945, when surviving Jews were sent to labor camps in Germany itself. Having killed 5.4 million Jews as racial enemies, the Germans then brought Jewish survivors home to do the work that the killers might have been doing themselves had they not been abroad killing.)

pp. 244-246 ~ Timothy Snyder

It is difficult to picture the rich, hard-nosed advisors of James I being overly concerned about the rights of vagabonds and felons. But this was a period that was especially suspicious of arbitrary acts by the Crown against individuals. There was no law enabling the crown to exile anyone, including the baser convict, into forced labour. According to legal scholars, the Magna Carta itself protected even them. The Privy Councillors therefore dressed up what was to befall the convicts and presented the decree authorising their transportation as an act of royal mercy. The convicts were to be reprieved from death in exchange for accepting transportation. (71-71) ~ Don Jordan

Resolved, That the General Assembly of Virginia, doth unequivocally express a firm resolution to maintain and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of this State, against every aggression either foreign or domestic, and that they will support the Government of the United States in all measures warranted by the former. ~ James Madison

I watched with incredulity as businessmen ran to the government in every crisis, whining for handouts or protection from the very competition that has made this system so productive. I saw Texas ranchers, hit by drought, demanding government-guaranteed loans; giant milk cooperatives lobbying for higher price supports; major airlines fighting deregulation to preserve their monopoly status; giant companies like Lockheed seeking federal assistance to rescue them from sheer inefficiency; bankers, like David Rockefeller, demanding government bailouts to protect them from their ill-conceived investments; network executives, like William Paley of CBS, fighting to preserve regulatory restrictions and to block the emergence of competitive cable and pay TV. And always, such gentlemen proclaimed their devotion to free enterprise and their opposition to the arbitrary intervention into our economic life by the state. Except, of course, for their own case, which was always unique and which was justified by their immense concern for the public interest. ~ William E. Simon

Democratic self-government has manifestly brought benefits to India, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, South Africa, South Korea, and scores of nations all making their way in the world. ~ Michael Gove

I believe that in time we will have reached the point where we will deserve to be free of government. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it. ~ Thomas Sowell

Most of the problems that we have are brought on by the government and not by music. Music is a mirror of what we're going through, not the cause of what we're going through. ~ Ice Cube

The way a government treats refugees is very instructive ... ~ Tony Benn

The government silenced a lotta those fellas. They even erased some of 'em's memory. They've spent a ton of money on all that alien technology research. It's why the federal deficit's so big. And then there's Elvis. ~ Angela Mullins

observing the way the rig needed only occasional human intervention to stay locked on the road. Doubtless it could have managed with none at all, were it not for local union laws. Very ~ Alastair Reynolds

In China, Internet surveillance has already become a profitable industry. In fact, a growing number of private firms eagerly assist the local police by aggregating this data and presenting it in easy-to-browse formats, allowing humans to pursue more analytical tasks. ~ Evgeny Morozov

It is the old masculine spirit of government as authority which is so slow in adapting itself to the democratic idea of government as service. That it should be a representative government they grasp, but representative of what? of the common will, they say; the will of the majority;--never thinking that it is the common good, the common welfare, that government should represent. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

While we can never truly repay the debt we owe our heroes, the least we should do for our brave veterans is to ensure that the government takes a proactive approach to delivering the services and benefits they have earned, so they can access the care they need and so richly deserve. ~ Kirsten Gillibrand

Blest is that government where no art thrives. ~ Thomas Nashe

The press is hostile to the idea of liberty. Most people in the press are for big government. Most people think that the solution to anything, whether it's health care problems, education, whatever it is - it's got to be more government. ~ Harry Browne

Almost all the prosperity of a public society and civil community does, under God, depend on their rulers. They are like the main springs or wheels in a machine that keep every part in their due motion, and are in the body politic, as in the vitals in the body natural, and as the pillars and the foundation in a building. ~ Jonathan Edwards

Government is as unreal, as intangible, as unapproachable as God. Try it, if you don't believe it. Seek through the legislative halls of America and find, if you can, the Government. In the end you will be doomed to confer with the agent, as before. ~ Voltairine De Cleyre

While many governments and well-meaning individuals have redefined marriage, the Lord has not. ~ Neil L. Andersen

Tobak Davenport, who is a cross between some Sugar Puffs and Lynn Faulds-Wood, was squatting there before being removed by the local constabulary after he went round to complain about Luther Blisset's pet turkey fouling the communal herb garden. ~ St John Morris

Thomas Jefferson despised newspapers, with considerable justification. They printed libels and slanders about him that persist to the present day. Yet he famously said that if he had to choose between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, he would cheerfully choose to live in a land with newspapers (even not very good ones) and no government. ~ Wesley Pruden

My mother was a leading lady in a local theatre in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up. ~ Mary Badham

Chinese entrepreneurs have to implement their work under the leadership of the Party and the government - it is very clear. ~ Li Shufu

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. ~ George Santayana

Liberals are wrong to think that opposition to health reform is a rejection of big government. If health reform consisted of extending Medicare to everyone, people would be delighted. There are millions of 64-year-olds out there who can hardly wait to be 65. ~ Marcia Angell

Perhaps I should have been one [some sort of a professional religious]; I like to think a monk notable for his austerities, the voice of one crying in the wilderness; but more probably a tiresome Unitarian in Walsall who writes incessantly to the local paper. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats. ~ Milton Friedman

We need the private sector's help, because government is not innovating. Technology is running ahead by leaps and bound. The private sector will help, just as I helped after 9/11. But they must be engaged, and they must be asked. I will ask them. I know them. ~ Ted Cruz