Role Of Government Quotes

In light of the unbroken record of invoking God's name in foundational documents throughout the world, throughout the colonies, and throughout history, the stubborn refusal of the US Constitution to invoke the Almighty is abnormal, historic, radical, and not accidental. But liberals miss a basic point, too: The framers of the Constitution were not contemplating the role of "government" in religion. They were debating the role of the national government in religion. ~ Steven Waldman

It is not the role of government to use the taxation and welfare system as a tool to level the playing field. ~ Joe Hockey

I would wager that my job has helped save our economy from the economic ravages of out-of-control environmental extremism. I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government. ~ Roy Spencer

I believe the role of government is to stand side by side with our citizens to help them realize their dreams, not tell citizens how to live their lives. ~ George W. Bush

The role of government is to steer us in the right direction, not do all the work for us. ~ Joe Lhota

It's a sense in Minnesota that we need to get back to common sense. We need to get back to taking sensible looks at positions and understanding the proper role of government. ~ Pete Hegseth

The country was founded on the principle that primary role of government is to protect property from the majority, and so it remains. ~ Noam Chomsky

I think, though, if I had to look at the role of government and what it does in people's lives, I see the EEOC as having much more legitimacy than the others, if properly run. ~ Clarence Thomas

I've said many times - I told William Buckley, I said, "You warped my mind and I never recovered from it." That was a principled, lawful understanding of the role of government, the Constitution. It was not based on racism, on demagoguery, but on strong principles that - which, consistent with the American heritage and our strength for the future. ~ Jeff Sessions

I do think the most important thing we need in leadership in our country, not just in the presidency but in the United States Senate, are people that have a clear vision of what the role of government should be in our lives and what the role of America should be in the world. ~ Marco Rubio

By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. THeir job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for which ideological commitment is far more relevant than elaborate field experience. ~ Naomi Klein

The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained.

The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . .

The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizi ~ Noel B. Reynolds

[Democrats] are trying on every front to increase the role of government. ~ Barney Frank

To reverse the trend and reduce the role of government in our lives, and thus alleviate the government deficit and inflation pressures, is a giant educational task. The social and economic ideas that gave birth to the transfer system must be discredited and replaced with old values of individual independence and self-reliance. The social philosophy of individual freedom and unhampered private property must again be our guiding light. ~ Hans F. Sennholz

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

Is the American tradition of self-reliance disappearing? That's a painful question for conservatives to ponder. After all, we're dedicated to reducing the role of government and promoting individual freedom and opportunity. But the facts, while sad, are clear: More Americans today depend more heavily on government than ever before. ~ Edwin Feulner

MY THESIS, in simplest terms, is: Let anyone do anything he pleases, so long as it is peaceful; the role of government, then, is to keep the peace ... Keeping the peace means no more than prohibiting persons from unpeaceful actions ... When government goes beyond this, that is, when government prohibits peaceful actions, such prohibitions themselves are, prima facie, unpeaceful. ~ Leonard E. Read

Progress does not compel us to settle centuries-old debates about the role of government for all time - but it does require us to act in our time, ~ Barack Obama

The role of government is to create responsible greed to keep boundaries around what people do. ~ Rebecca M. Blank

What about the lame, the sick and the destitute?" Is an often-voiced question. Most other countries in the world have attempted to use the power of government to meet this need. Yet, in every case, the improvement has been marginal at best and has resulted in the long run creating more misery, more poverty, and certainly less freedom than when government first stepped in.

Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of man kind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own… The harm dome by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional 'do-gooder,' who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others - with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means."(The Proper Role of Government, Ezra T. Benson) ~ Ezra Taft Benson

FDR rejected Hamilton's focus on the needs of an economic elite in favor of «jefferson's focus on the needs and interst of the common man.
Pursuing the American Dream, 6, 175 ~ Calvin C. Jillson

The role of government has never been to plan every detail or dictate every outcome. At its best, government has simply knocked away barriers to opportunity and laid the foundation for a better future. Our people
with all their drive and ingenuity
always end up building the rest. And if we can do that again
if we can continue building that foundation and making those hard decisions on behalf of the next generation
I have no doubt that we will leave our children the America that we all hope for. ~ Barack Obama

Only if government fulfilled its responsibility by fostering a robust economy was it ressonable to hold individuals responsible for working hard and striving to do their best.
Pursuing the American Dream, 8, 246 ~ Calvin C. Jillson

The proper role of government is exactly what John Stuart Mill said in the middle of the nineteenth century in On Liberty. The proper role of government is to prevent other people from harming an individual. Government, he said, never has any right to interfere with an individual for that individual's own good. ~ Milton Friedman

The leading virtue of conservative politics as I see it is the preference for procedure over ideological programs. Liberals tend to believe that government exists in order to lead the people into a better future, in which liberty, equality, social justice, the socialist millennium, or something of that kind will be realized. ... Conservatives believe that the role of government is not to lead society towards a goal but to ensure that, wherever society goes, it goes there peacefully. Government exists in order to conciliate opposing views, to manage conflicts, and to ensure peaceful transactions between the citizens, as they compete in the market, and associate in what Burke called their "little platoons. ~ Roger Scruton

My quarrel is not with the legitimate role of government but with the unlimited role of government. ~ Rick Perry

The Constitution limits the role of government. The Constitution enumerates the freedoms of the people and enforces those freedoms against government, making sure government cannot encroach. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I had to sign the paper to shut down the government. It's terrible ... [But] what the shutdown showed many, many people is the importance of the role of government. And as frustrated [as people get with] Washington, there are so many things [the government does] that are so important to people's lives every day. The panda cam, paying small businesses their loans - these are all things that shut down. ~ Sylvia Mathews Burwell

There's room in the Republican Party for anyone who wants to be a part of the values that we espouse when it comes to the role of government, free enterprise, free markets. ~ Michael Steele

Liberal Democrats are inexorably opposed to tax cuts, because tax cuts give people more power, and take away from the role of government. ~ Rush Limbaugh

But the Wisconsin tradition meant more than a simple belief in the people. It also meant a faith in the application of intelligence and reason to the problems of society. It meant a deep conviction that the role of government was not to stumble along like a drunkard in the dark, but to light its way by the best torches of knowledge and understanding it could find. ~ Adlai Stevenson

Solidarity and interdependence, a sense of worth, a pride and hope in the future: these are positive gains for those who believe in progressive politics and the beneficial role of government, rather than a detriment. ~ David Blunkett

There are skeptics who do not come to their view because they have a source of income from carbon polluters. ~ Al Gore

To me, that's the role of government: not to give people a hand out, but a hand up ... giving people the tools to pave their own way to success. ~ James Langevin

In the wake of World War II, most Democrats and liberals claimed that if justice could be done and was not, only evil intent could explain the inaction. Most Republicans and conservatives replied scornfully that the vagabonds were simply calling yet again for an equal share of wealth that others had earned. Most moderates, both Democrats and Republicans, admitted that more justice demanded to be done, but they warned that equality, absent the striving and competition that had always characterized American life, might be an attractive dream, but it was not "the" American Dream.
Pursuing the American Dream, 7, 196 ~ Calvin C. Jillson

It is not the role of government or any central planner to formulate the final distributions of wealth and income. ~ Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr

It has always been the role of government to help solve problems, including and especially health crises. Obesity is a health epidemic across our country, and we have a responsibility as a government and a society to do all we can to promote good nutrition and healthy eating so we can reverse this alarming trend. ~ Richard J. Codey

I talked about the barriers created by monopolies. I said that it was the role of government to break up these monopolies and that we couldn't do it alone. ~ Joichi Ito

What do you think the appropriate role of government is in society? The way I look at this job is, you want me to do X? Well, is the private sector doing X with any kind of success? Because if they are, I'd rather have them do it than have us do it. ~ Chris Christie

There is simply nothing so important to a people and its government as how many of them there are, whether their number is growing or declining, how they are distributed as between different ages, sexes, and different social classes and racial and ethnic groups, and again, which way these numbers are moving. ~ Daniel Patrick Moynihan

This, not incidentally, is another perfect setting for deindividuation: on one side, the functionary behind a wall of security glass following a script laid out with the intention that it should be applied no matter what the specific human story may be, told to remain emotionally disinvested as far as possible so as to avoid preferential treatment of one person over another - and needing to follow that advice to avoid being swamped by empathy for fellow human beings in distress. The functionary becomes a mixture of Zimbardo's prison guards and the experimenter himself, under siege from without while at the same time following an inflexible rubric set down by those higher up the hierarchical chain, people whose job description makes them responsible, but who in turn see themselves as serving the general public as a non-specific entity and believe or have been told that only strict adherence to a system can produce impartial fairness. Fairness is supposed to be vested in the code: no human can or should make the system fairer by exercising judgement. In other words, the whole thing creates a collective responsibility culminating in a blameless loop. Everyone assumes that it's not their place to take direct personal responsibility for what happens; that level of vested individual power is part of the previous almost feudal version of responsibility. The deindividuation is actually to a certain extent the desired outcome, though its negative consequences are not. ~ Nick Harkaway

Gandhi became my role model. I have always been interested in Eastern philosophy. Since early in my life I've been fascinated by India, and I have spent a great deal of time traveling in that country. ~ Bianca Jagger

When people treat corruption as a routine part of the process, you have something far worse than wrongdoing or moral failing. You have a political cancer that breeds cynicism about democratic government and infects all of society. ~ Edward Brooke

Recipients of transfers tend to become less self-reliant and more dependent on government payments. When people can get support without exercising their own abilities to discover and respond to opportunities for earning income, those abilities atrophy. People forget - or never learn in the first place - how to help themselves, and eventually some of them simply accept their helplessness. ~ Robert Higgs

We are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them. Our privacy is being strip-mined and hoarded. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Bankruptcies of governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans. ~ R. H. Tawney

Once the principle is admitted that it is the duty of the government to protect the individual against his own foolishness, no serious objections can be advanced against further encroachments. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

To recap: it is possible to put decent information into a Government Machine, have ordinary, good people running the thing, and a reasonable system in place, and still get utter idiocy out of the dispenser?"
"More than possible. Likely. ~ Nick Harkaway

If we're going to improve the environment, the first thing we should do is duck the government. The second thing we should do is quit being moral. Screw the rights of nature. Nature will have rights as soon as it get duties. The minute we see birds, trees, bugs, and squirrels picking up litter, giving money to charity, and keeping an eye on our kids at the park, we'll let them vote. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

I'm a bad, inconsistent person, but at least I'm not a member of the Tea Party griping incoherently about too much government, but flashing my Medicare card every other day to a doctor because I'm 400 pounds overweight. ~ George Singleton

It's important for me to show my children the richness of life and be a role model. I find that my organizational and management skills are tested more at home than at work! ~ Susan Wojcicki

What we see in a democracy governed by "representatives" is not a government "for the people" but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power. ~ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

You didn't build that' will be Obama's political epitaph: With these remarks, Obama has come out of the closet as a most odious collectivist, who believes religiously that government predation is a condition for production. Or, put simply, that the parasite created the host. ~ Ilana Mercer

I believe the role of the writer is to tell society what it pretends it does not know. ~ Mariam Khan

Every role you play is literally - and I've said this before - every single role that you play, the only way you can connect to that character is because that was a piece of you that was scattered around that yard, almost like we got caught up in some whirlwind. ~ Terrence Howard

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

The West has its share of liars and poseurs, the ablest of whom congregate in government. ~ Ilana Mercer

He became one of the few voices in U.S. government to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler ~ Erik Larson

The word Amendment itself is an encouraging thing, isn't it? Because an amendment, it tells of a system of government that allows for the improvement of itself. Just move forward a little bit, one day at a time. ~ Daniel Day-Lewis

We have been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. But if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else? ~ Ronald Reagan

Our old people noticed this from the beginning. They said that the white man lived in a world of cages, and that if we didn't look out, they would make us live in cages too.
So we started noticing. Everything looked like cages. Your clothes fit like cages. Your houses looked like cages. You put your fences around your yards so they looked like cages. Everything was a cage. You turned the land into cages. Little squares.
Then after you had all these cages you made a government to protect these cages. And that government was all cages. All laws about what you couldn't do. The only freedom you had was inside your own cage. Then you wondered why you weren't happy and didn't feel free. You made all the cages, the you wondered why you didn't feel free. ~ Kent Nerburn

The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth, including illegal drugs, than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth. ~ Milton Friedman

Sponsors, corporate endowments, and the heritage of the big fortunes would take care of financing cultural projects when American society was homogeneous. Now it's too complex, it's a mix. Different cultures in collision. I think it starts to be necessary to have a government institution to deal with cultural affairs. ~ Gilberto Gil

Wise politicians will be cautious about fettering the government with restrictions that cannot be observed, because they know that every break of the fundamental laws, though dictated by necessity, impairs that sacred reverence which ought to be maintained in the breast of rulers towards the constitution of a country. ~ Alexander Hamilton

I was a professor at Princeton University. And, in that capacity, I studied for many years the role of financial crisis in the economy. ~ Ben Bernanke

Yes, I'm talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness.
A consciousness that is able to understand
how we're all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth,
and to the Earth itself.
And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril.
Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality
because it's painful, it's frightening.
Sometimes, it's terrifying.
It's terrifying to face the truth.
So I ask each of you to search your hearts,
as to what your truth is,
for being a citizen of the Earth,
promoting justice as a foundation for peace.
It's not going to happen magically,
it's not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions.
I think we're going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways
whether our government wants it or not.
Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness,
we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet.
We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price.
And what more glorious goal than peace for all people?
...To build a new society, a society that understands
that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less.
And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks
to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings. ~ S. Brian Willson

I'm labeled a comedic actor, which is awesome. But I love getting the occasional dramatic role, too. Some of your best dramatic actors are ultimately comedians. ~ Jim O'Heir

It is right that the influence of the Government should be known in every humble home as the guardian of frugal comfort and content, and a defense against unjust exactions, and the unearned tribute persistently coveted by the selfish and designing. It is right that efficiency and honesty in public service should not be sacrificed to partisan greed; and it is right that the suffrage of our people should be pure and free. ~ Grover Cleveland

A critic often has to play the role of coroner, dissecting a work to find out why it died (or never lived). ~ David Edelstein

Eventually my rejection of authority spilled into self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, and by the time I enrolled in college, I'd begun to see how any challenge to convention harbored within it the possibility of its own excesses and its own orthodoxy. I started to reexamine my assumptions, and recalled the values my mother and grandparents had taught me. In this slow, fitful process of sorting out what I believed, I began silently registering the point in dorm-room conversations when my college friends and I stopped thinking and slipped into can't: the point at which the denunciations of capitalism or American imperialism came too easily, and the freedom from the constraints of monogamy or religion was proclaimed without fully understanding the value of such constraints, and the role of victim was too readily embraced as a means of shedding responsibility, or asserting entitlement, or claiming moral superiority over those not so victimized. ~ Barack Obama

Churchill was fundamentally what the English call unstable - by which they mean anybody who has that touch of genius which is inconvenient in normal times. ~ Harold Macmillan

In fact, if you look at people within our government, they seem to be quite enthusiastically fighting the war against their own people at the behest of the United States. So it doesn't seem to me that the strong way to oppose this is by joining politics at all, but just to keep speaking and to keep talking about it. ~ Fatima Bhutto

I merely consider myself a father, and one role of a father is to provide financial resources for his family. ~ Guy Kawasaki

The velocity of decision making in government was extraordinary slow. It took 18 to 24 months and 15 to 20 trips to Delhi to get a license to import computers. ~ N. R. Narayana Murthy

Thus we find that the unconditioned condition of the goodness of anything is rational nature...To play this role, however, rational nature must itself be something of unconditional value--and end in itself. ~ Christine M. Korsgaard

The mass media. What are they? They're huge corporations, massive corporations, linked up with even bigger corporations. They sell audiences to other businesses, namely advertisers. So when you turn on the television set, CBS doesn't make any money. They make money from the advertisers. You're the product that they're selling, and the same is true of the daily newspaper. They're huge corporations, selling audiences, potential consumers, to other businesses, all linked up closely to the government, especially the big media. What picture of the world do you expect them to present? ~ Noam Chomsky

Parents are a role model for their youngsters and how they act with these small ones or in front of them can be grasped easily. ~ Patricia Dsouza

Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it"

Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk of financial loss due to illness. But somebody has to pay for all that high-quality, ready-when-you-need-it care--and the patients, so far, have not been willing to do so. As a result, the major health insurance funds are all operating at a deficit, and the costs of the health care system are increasing significantly faster than the economy as a whole. That's why the doctors keep striking and the sickness funds keep negotiating and the government keeps going back to the drawing board, with a new 'major health care reform' every few years. So far, the saving grace for France's system has been the high level of efficiency, as exemplified by the 'carte vitale,' that keeps administrative costs low--much lower than in the United States. ~ T.R. Reid

There are, for example, exemptions in FOIA in which the government can withhold certain kinds of information, and the courts have recognized that there is certain documentation that do deserve protection, that certain privileges do apply and do deserve protection. ~ Alberto Gonzales

I still believe that, in the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster. As I said earlier in this debate, our economic medicine may be painful but it is fast and powerful because it can act freely. ~ John James Cowperthwaite

The gap between what one knows and what one thinks one knows may be higher in the ranks of the elite. The result is supposedly-clever government interventions, introduced with excessive confidence, leading to disastrous results. ~ Arnold Kling

The divine right of kings may have been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of government is the keystone of human progress, and without it governments sink into police, and a nation is degraded into a mob. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

When a government goes to war, particularly a democracy, it is the most solemn and awesome responsibility of our leaders - to decide to send our kids to go off and kill and die for us. ~ Joe Wilson

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government. ~ Socrates

For most, not knowing how to say no is where their lives decline into a thicket of stress and unhappiness. These individuals are easy to spot, as they constantly take on the role of victim to the world's desires. ~ Brendon Burchard

I go where the revolution is, and the revolution is Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a champion of the Constitution. He's about getting rid of the Federal Reserve and shrinking federal government. ~ Christine Ebersole