Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The excellence of metallic money in free circulation consists in the fact that it renders impossible the abuse of the power of the government to dispose of the possessions of its citizens by means of its monetary policy and thus serves as the solid foundation of economic liberty within each country and of free trade between one country and another.
Economists have provided capitalists with a comforting concept called the "free market." It does not describe any part of reality, at any place or time. It's a mantra conveniently invoked when it is proposed that government do something the faithful don't like, and just as conveniently ignored whenever they want government to do something for them.
I think the president [Barack Obama] adopted some of that same language, but took it into the White House. And I think, like, there's a crucial difference between being, you know, Joe Schmo in the neighborhood and being the head, you know, of the government that, you know, in many ways is largely responsible for those conditions in the first place.
What we mean by an outcome will naturally depend on the context. Thus, for a government charged with delivering public goods, an outcome will consist of the quantities provided of such goods as intercity highways, national defense and security, environmental protection, and public education together with the arrangements by which they are financed.
The mere summoning of a witness and compelling him to testify against his will, about his beliefs, expressions or associations, is a measure of governmental interference. And when those forced revelations concern maters that are unorthodox, unpopular, or even hateful to the general public, the reactions in the life of the witness may be disastrous.
During the years I lived here, the people of Alexandra ignored tribal and ethnic distinctions. Instead of being Xhosas, or Sothos, or Zulus, or Shangaans, we were Alexandrans. We were one people, and we undermined the distinctions that the apartheid government tried so hard to impose. It saddens and angers me to see the rising hatred of foreigners.
[N]o clear steps have actually been taken to apprehend and prosecute those known to have been in command of the camp or the forces operating there....The new government of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic has pledged to act. It must now generate the political will to act. The protection of those responsible for this crime can no longer be tolerated.
I am honored that my freshman class colleagues have put their trust in me to represent our historic class at the leadership table. The incoming freshman class of Representatives is large and diverse but we share many common goals including cutting wasteful spending, getting our economy back on track and making government smarter and more efficient.
We may be assured by past experience, that such a practice [as some states charging high taxes on goods from other states] would be introduced by future contrivances; and both by that and a common knowledge of human affairs, that it would nourish unceasing animosities, and not improbably terminate in serious interruptions of the public tranquility.
This Government, the offspring of your own choice, uninfluenced and unawed, adopted upon full investigation and mature deliberation, completely free in its principles, in the distribution of its powers, uniting security with energy, and containing within itself a provision for its own amendment, has a just claim to your confidence and your support.
Look at Germany where 20 percent of the labor force is in manufacturing compared to about 8 percent in the United States. Germany pays a lot more conscious attention at the level of the federal government to attracting and keeping manufacturers in Germany. So this is something that other countries do that the United States has not historically done.
Taxes are a barbaric remnant of ancient times in which early farmers, tied to the land, no longer able to roam freely, unable to fight back with awkward agricultural tools the way they once could with hunting implements, became victims, first, of itinerant plunderers, then of bandits settling down beside them to become the governments we know today.
Harvard graduates just cannot shake the idea that they know better than everyone else what's best for us and that they're capable of running a mammoth, unwieldy government program providing each one of us with the precise health insurance we need, at a good price, with no waste or fraud. Trust them, they worked it all out on paper their junior year.
Businesses will only invest in Greece if three conditions are fulfilled. First, there must be a clear commitment to the euro. No businesses will invest if they have to fear that Greece will leave the euro zone at some point. Second, the Greek government must be prepared to work together with European institutions in order to restructure the country.
Anecdote: The East End seemed to be in the grip of yet another economic crisis. ... By the winter of 1933, an army of the unemployed gathered daily outside the dock gates, desperate for a day or 2 paid work. .... There was no cushion, no disaster fund, no stashed savings, no government handouts no syrup that could sweeten the bitter pill of poverty.
I should say that Canada is one of the major criminals, not just the tar sands and so on, but even mining throughout the world, a lot of it is Canadian. It's extremely destructive, so an important thing for Canadians to do is curtail the predatory and destructive behavior of their own government and corporations. A carbon tax is one way of doing it.
The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America." No, no, no, God d*mn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. God d*mn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God d*mn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.
Church, the spiritual power, and the executive power are working today united in a system that confronts people. This alliance or cooperation between the spiritual power and the executive power, between the church and the government, unfortunately takes away the Church's basic mission. It takes away their right to speak on moral or ethical subjects.
The civil Government, though bereft of every thing like an associated hierarchy, possesses the requisite stability, and performs its functions with complete success; whilst the number, the industry, and the morality of the Priesthood, and the devotion of the people, have been manifestly increased by the total separation of the church from the State.
No government can continue good but under the control of the people; and . . . . their minds are to be informed by education what is right and what wrong; to be encouraged in habits of virtue and to be deterred from those of vice . . . . These are the inculcations necessary to render the people a sure basis for the structure and order of government.
It is important for me, as a popular artist, to make clear to the governments of the United States and Mexico that despite the strategy of fear and intimidation to foreigners, despite their weapons, despite their immigration laws and military reserves, they will never be able to isolate the Zapatista communities from the people in the United States.
The more power a government has the more it can act arbitrarily according to the whims and desires of the elite, and the more it will make war on others and murder its foreign and domestic subjects. The more constrained the power of governments, the more power is diffused, checked, and balanced, the less it will aggress on others and commit democide.
The leftists are constantly whining and moaning about all the money in politics. They want campaign finance reform, right? They want to get all the money out of politics. They want government money governing campaigns. They want all the money out, they say. But then you look at their coffers, and it's overflowing with hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Framers of the First Amendment were not concerned with preventing government from abridging their freedom to speak about crops and cockfighting, or with protecting the expressive activity of topless dancers, which of late has found some shelter under the First Amendment. Rather, the Framers cherished unabridged freedom of political communication.
The government in business may waste time and money without rendering service. In the end the public pays in taxes. The corporation cannot waste or it will fall. It cannot make unfair rulings or give high-handed, expensive service, for there are not enough people willing to accept inferior service to make a volume of business that will pay dividends.
The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life - this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.
You still could go to some industry or some university or the government and if you could persuade them you had something on the ball—why, then, they might put up the cash after cutting themselves in on just about all of the profits. And, naturally, they'd run the show because it was their money and all you had done was the sweating and the bleeding.
U.N. officials said today they desperately need $7 billion to help people cope with disasters, but they're having a hard time getting people to send rescue money. Here's what the UN should do: Invest in bad mortgages, run a bank into the ground, give yourself a bonus, get some spa treatments and, in no time, the government will send you $750 billion.
Few relationships are as critical to the business enterprise as the relationship to the government. Managers have responsibility for this relationship as part of their responsibility to the enterprise itself. It is an area of social impact of the business. To a large extent the relationship to government results from what businesses do or fail to do.
This is a book called Women in the Shade of Islam. It's published by the government of Saudi Arabia. I picked it up in Pakistan, where the Taliban Ladies Auxiliary, and our young wife in California would've picked up an item like this. And it puts out that Salafi-Wahhabi ideology that is ultimately the toxic poison that is crossing all these borders.
Maybe it's understandable what a history of failures America's foreign policy has been. We are, after all, a country full of people who came to America to get away from foreigners. Any prolonged examination of the U.S. government reveals foreign policy to be America's miniature schnauzer -- a noisy but small and useless part of the national household.
You cannot extend the mastery of government over the daily life of a people without somewhere making it master of people's souls and thoughts.... Every step in that direction poisons the very roots of liberalism. It poisons political equality, free speech, free press, and equality of opportunity. It is the road not to more liberty but to less liberty.
In the North, neither greenbacks, taxes, nor war bonds were enough to finance the war. So a national banking system was created to convert government bonds into fiat money, and the people lost over half of their monetary assets to the hidden tax of inflation. In the South, printing presses accomplished the same effect, and the monetary loss was total.
Some of my colleagues who are criticized today for lack of forthright principles-or who are looked upon with scorn as compromising "politicians"-are simply engaged in the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function.
Conservatives say the government can't end poverty by force, but they believe it can use force to make people moral. Liberals say government can't make people be moral, but they believe it can end poverty. Neither group attempts to explain why government is so clumsy and destructive in one area but a paragon of efficiency and benevolence in the other.
The United States wanted to send its trained rebel groups to Syria to fight ISIS. Out of twenty-five hundred rebels they had trained, only seventy accepted to go to Syria to fight ISIS. Everybody else wanted to go to Syria to fight the government. So you've got to wake up and smell the coffee. . . . The rebel groups have not fired a shot against ISIS.
Islam's basic principles of belief, worship, morality, and behavior are not affected by changing times. Islam does not propose a certain unchangeable form of government or attempt to shape it. Islam has never offered nor established a theocracy in its name. Instead, Islam establishes fundamental principles that orient a government's general character.
The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees.Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain.
The underlying issue is the system of capitalism itself, and under this system the best means for regulating or checking their power is not relying on a government which represents the interests of the rich but for millions of working people to become politically active in workplaces and communities through building unions and our own political party.
I spoke at the University of Georgia, and a whole contingent of Tea Party people in Hell's Angels regalia came in and sat in the front and scowled at me while I gave my talk. And afterwards the head of the group got to the microphone and said, I'm surprised that I agree with almost everything you said, but I'm worried that you're a big government guy.
Kofi Annan described World Summit on the Information Society as the first summit to deal primarily with an opportunity. The range of issues and potential opportunities that might be included in the Information Society is enormous. Compromise texts are very poor at addressing these in any meaningful way, and many governments see little point in trying.
There be three sorts of government--monarchical, aristocratical, democratical; and they are apt to fall three several ways into ruin--the first, by tyranny; the second, by ambition; the last, by tumults. A commonwealth grounded upon any one of these is not of long continuance; but, wisely mingled, each guards the other and makes that government exact.
The real problem is the total capitulation of German social democracy to capitalism, reflected and symbolized by actual extreme center coalition governments in Germany, which have been in power for a long time and still are even as we speak. That is the real problem: that there is no serious opposition in Germany at all. And the Left party is divided.
Disturbingly, the First Amendment, along with the Fourth Amendment - protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures, and requiring warrants - have been the major casualties of the shift in government policy in the last two decades. Unfortunately, I think that the biggest consequences of this tragedy won't be clear until it is far, far too late.
There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that, if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The DEMOCRATIC idea, however, has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them
The theory of social contracts extends as far back as Plato. However, it was the great 18th century social philosophers John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who brought the concept of a social contract between citizens and governments sharply into political thinking, paving the way for popular democracy and constitutional republicanism.
For those who fancy that government's projects are uniquely important, or for those who imagine that holding government office makes someone unusually saintly or trustworthy, entrusting government with power that we would never entrust to our neighbors or other private citizens might seem sensible. To me, it's dangerous, unjustified, and unjustifiable.
I'm not trying to be diplomatic. I'm trying to be more nuanced and realistic. I think there has to be a serious examination of the shortcomings of the Euro structure. Euro central institutions, whether it be fiscal policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, are simply not as robust as they are in a currency that has a national government behind it.
I think during the Cold War in America at least, there was a division; there was the Soviet government and there were the oppressed people, who were not represented by this government. That was a massive oversimplification of what the true situation was there. There were certainly many people who were completely and fully alienated from the government.
It will be, I suppose, a foolhardy Government that tries to push through legislation making knowledge of both official languages one of the qualifications for election to the House of Commons or appointment to the Senate, but maybe it will have to come to this as a price we must pay for equality of the two great language groups of our founding fathers.