Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It is perfectly clear, in the first place, that the constitution of the United States did not, of itself, create or establish slavery as a new institution; or even give any authority to the state governments to establish it as a new institution. The greatest sticklers for slavery do not claim this.
Cricket pays well, so a lot of people are naturally drawn towards the game. But to carve a niche in non-cricket sports is not easy. So state governments need to be proactive. Indians need to be made aware of the power of an Olympic medal. It should be treated at par with an Oscars or a Nobel Prize.
Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies - where police departments compete to acquire military gear that goes far beyond what most of Americans think of as law enforcement.
Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone.
I love cities, and I love city governments in particular. But in politics it would have taken me 8 years from implementing a policy before I would get to see the feedback. With programming I could model the same policies and see the impact immediately. Technology is a far more efficient way to test.
The move to tax Internet sales, clothed as a 'fairness' issue, is the typical 'wolf-in-sheep's-clothing' ploy so often used by governments unwilling to cut expenditures to match revenues. It matters not whether its proponents have a 'D' or an 'R' after their name. It is a tax increase in either case.
States should require vaccinations for communicable diseases, like measles and the mumps. But you can't catch HPV if an infected schoolmate coughs on you or shares your juice box at lunch. Whether or not girls get vaccinated against HPV is a decision for parents and physicians, not state governments.
Unlike despotisms, modern democracies are not supposed promiscuously to accumulate property and then charge their taxpayers to maintain it. But that is what they do. Governments are always trying to extend their responsibilities and their estates, and it is very hard for parliaments to reign them in.
Just as a balloon filled gradually with air bursts when the limit of its tensile strength is passed, there are thresholds of radical, disruptive change in politics. When those thresholds are crossed, the impossible suddenly becomes probable, with revolutionary implications for governments and nations.
2009 was a tough year, but Australia rose to the challenge of the global financial crisis. It shows what can be done when we all join together and work together, governments of all persuasions state, territory and local; businesses large and small; unions and local communities right across the nation.
Brexit wasn't the European people's first cry of revolt. In 2005, France and the Netherlands held referendums about the proposed European Union constitution. In both countries, opposition was massive, and other governments decided on the spot to halt the experiment for fear the contagion might spread.
Governments should end the extreme concentration of wealth in order to end poverty. This means tackling tax dodging but also increasing taxes on wealth and high incomes to ensure a more level playing field and generate the billions of dollars needed to invest in healthcare, education, and job creation.
We as the governments, workers, employers and civil society must declare a war on child labour. This war cannot be won without strong, committed, coherent, and well-resourced worldwide movement. Equally needed is a genuine and active coordination between intergovernmental agencies at the highest level.
Civil society space provides the oxygen for citizens to participate and meaningfully hold their governments and the private sector to account - and ensure that decisions are made in the interest of the majority and not the few. Without it, citizens have limited space to dissent and challenge the elites.
People need to realise that their governments are sitting on finite resources that will run out one day. Subsidising power and water is not an ideal solution and does not help reduce consumption. We need to educate people, from a young age, about the importance of conserving energy in their daily lives.
In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.
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.
In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four,' protagonist Winston Smith works at a propaganda department for the state called the 'Ministry of Truth,' where inconvenient news can be discarded down a 'memory hole.' Orwell was fixated on the idea that under certain governments, the past can be altered or documents rewritten.
I think if you look down the road for Twitter, we would like to be a company - a service - that is used by billions of people around the world in every country in the world because we feel that the power of Twitter is that it brings people closer to each other, to their governments, to their heroes, etc.
The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.
I was totally surprised by the spread of the legalization of same-sex marriage. In just my lifetime we have gone from a taboo to even talk about homosexuality, to the sanction by governments of homosexual marriage. Few such large social considerations have ever before been turned over in such a short time.
The era during which only governments could put hardware on the Moon is coming to an end. There are 26 private teams competing for the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize - to be awarded for sending a robotic spacecraft to this nearby world that can roam at least 500 meters, and send back data such as a photo.
Government is inevitably going to play a very significant role in infrastructure, and in a country with a federal system where vibrancy and economic health depend on interstate commerce, it's not going to be private enterprise or state governments that will give you things like an interstate highway system.
Nelson Mandela went to jail believing in violence, and 27 years later he and his colleagues had slowly and carefully honed the skills, the incredible skills, that they needed to turn one of the most vicious governments the world has known into a democracy. And they did it in a total devotion to non-violence.
We have got to make sure there is proper independent scrutiny and accountability for people in the press, just as there should be in any other industry where things go wrong. But let's not try and think it is for politicians or governments to tell people what they stick in newspapers. That is deeply illiberal.
Friendly governments do not act so as to undermine the national security of their friends, and do not presume to know better than their friends how they should contend with the many challenges they face. The Swedish government would do well to rethink its intention to act in this way towards its friend Israel.
I don't hold America responsible for the largely oppressive governments in the 22 Arab countries. There are repressive Arab governments that are our allies and there are those that are our nominal enemies. It doesn't make a whole lot of difference to what extent we're involved in propping up those governments.
The commitment to put an end to illegal deforestation and develop sustainable alternatives for commodities like palm oil and soy, for example, is an inspiring illustration of what can be achieved when governments and industry partners come together determined to bring about transformational market-wide changes.
We need to develop and disseminate an entirely new paradigm and practice of collaboration that supersedes the traditional silos that have divided governments, philanthropies and private enterprises for decades and replace it with networks of partnerships working together to create a globally prosperous society.
The thing I would say is governments have the tendency to over-promise and under-perform. So the over-promise part ends up sounding very aspirational. But it's the performance part that ultimately people feel every day and read about. And my goal is to make sure, whatever it is we aspire to, that we deliver on.
Many, including the Canadian and U.S. governments, try to provide family support while also maintaining a hard line about further fuelling terrorism and hostage-taking through ransom payments ... Still, try telling that to a mother, or a father, or a husband or wife caught in the powerless agony of standing by.
All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments.
People have had certain assumptions in the past about Conservative governments, partly because of some of the things that happened in the 1980s, and partly because of the tone of some of the debate in the 1980s that appeared to say public spending on the arts was something you might want to progressively reduce.
Governments follow their people. A great deal has to do with the vision of the leadership of governments. They have a vision, and they translate that to their people and to their counterparts in other countries. You can fulfill and achieve a great deal if you get along well as individuals, as people, as persons.
The idea that, in the age of Google, Facebook and the internet, government can control the 'commanding heights' of the economy is one of the great delusions of our age. Modern techonology, social media, the explosion of online retail, among many other things, have meant that governments have less and less control.
Effectively, what we are saying to the governments of Europe is, 'OK, after 300 years, you have left these islands in a pretty bad state. You've left them with terrible developmental challenges, and we believe you have a responsibility to return to the Caribbean and participate in the rebuilding of the Caribbean.'
In villages across the developing world, governments have provided reasonable enough latrines that have again and again been turned into storage spaces or simply abandoned. In India alone, millions of government-funded latrines have become goat-sheds. Some had been built near kitchens, a taboo in Indian households.
We apologise for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.
If terror groups are to be defeated, it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India, governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan, the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit.
Governments that block the aspirations of their people, that steal or are corrupt, that oppress and torture or that deny freedom of expression and human rights should bear in mind that they will find it increasingly hard to escape the judgement of their own people, or where warranted, the reach of international law.
Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.
The argument that gay marriage doesn't affect straight marriages is a ridiculous red herring: Gay marriage affects society and law in dramatic ways. Religious groups will come under direct assault as federal and state governments move to strip them of their non-profit statuses if they refuse to perform gay marriages.
While sanctions against Iran and Syria are intended to constrain those countries' governments, they have had the unfortunate side effect of constraining activists' access to free online software and services used widely across the Middle East, including browsers, online chat applications, and online storage services.
My education was dominated by modernist thinkers and artists who taught me that the supreme imperative was courage to face the awful truth, to scorn the soft-minded optimism of religious and secular romantics as well as the corrupt optimism of governments, advertisers, and mechanistic or manipulative revolutionaries.
Unprecedented in modern British history and outside all normal civil service rules, a bunch of MPs, some of them working with foreign governments, wrote primary legislation - 'the Surrender Act' also known as the Benn Act - without any of the scrutiny of who influenced and who funded it that is normal for legislation.
The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
It is not a coincidence that we have managed to send rockets into space, but our literacy rate continues to be below the world average. It is because governments don't want an educated electorate. Because if we get educated, we will start asking the right questions. And they don't want the right questions being asked.
History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to 'protect' their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression and other freedoms outlined in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must make sure, collectively, that the Internet avoids a similar fate.
If governments decide to return to the Moon - as seems to be the case - it must be to build villages, not bases, and to do it as rapidly as possible, as it needs to be an immediate challenge, not a distant dream. And if some want to go to Mars or mine asteroids, they need to be seen as part of a new frontier community.
When governments rely increasingly on sophisticated public relations agencies, public debate disappears and is replaced by competing propaganda campaigns, with all the accompanying deceits. Advertising isn't about truth or fairness or rationality, but about mobilising deeper and more primitive layers of the human mind.