Quotes About Citizens And Government

#1. The relationship between citizens and government is increasingly mediated through the Internet.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#2. Government systems suffer from two weaknesses. They are complex. And they are slow. We need to change this. Our systems need to be made sharp, effective, fast and flexible. This requires simplification of processes and having trust in citizens. This needs a Policy Driven State.

Narendra Modi

#3. Ensuring the access of all citizens to government information and to essential information for human development is a must for every democratic society.

Koichiro Matsuura

#4. 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

#5. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative.

Richard P. Feynman

#6. Today, as in the Gilded Age, we live in a world where a morality of personal responsibility rubs shoulders with a culture of greed and of flagrant social irresponsibility. Now as then, business has shed its collective responsibility for employees - just as government has for its citizens.

Charles Derber

#7. The labor unions shall have a square deal, and the corporations shall have a square deal, and in addition, all private citizens shall have a square deal.

Theodore Roosevelt

#8. Unfortunately, corruption is widespread in government agencies and public enterprises. Our political system promotes nepotism and wasting money. This has undermined our legal system and confidence in the functioning of the state. One of the consequences is that many citizens don't pay their taxes.

George Papandreou

#9. Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.

William Greider

#10. There is no direct and immediate connection between the individual citizens of a state and the general government. The relation between them is through the state. The Union is a union of states as communities and not a union of individuals.

John C. Calhoun

#11. Everything that he was saying sounded incredible, but Frank knew enough about politics to know that governments got away with what they did because they counted on ordinary citizens dismissing events as being too incredible and implausible.

Thrity Umrigar

#12. In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all.

Aristotle.

#13. I realize that I cannot stand by silently as my government executes its citizens. If I do not speak out and resist, I am an accomplice.

Helen Prejean

#14. Overall, the work of rebuilding and transforming government for the digital age is only just beginning. Governments remain organized according to political and bureaucratic imperatives, not according to what makes the most sense to citizens.

Andrew Leigh

#15. In order to have greater visibility of the larger cyber threat landscape, we must remove the government bureaucratic stovepipes that inhibit our abilities to effectively defend America while ensuring citizens' privacy and civil liberties are also protected.

Michael McCaul

#16. If children do not understand the Constitution, they cannot understand how our government functions, or what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens of the United States.

John Roberts

#17. A government by secrecy benefits no one. It injures the people it seeks to serve; it damages its own integrity and operation. It breeds distrust, dampens the fervor of its citizens and mocks their loyalty.

Russell B. Long

#18. The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of "freedom".

Joseph Sobran

#19. The further the departure from direct and constant control by the citizens, the less has the government of the ingredient of republicanism ...

Thomas Jefferson

#20. You might not think of something like TurboTax as a civic venture, but that product took a confusing interface to a government process and made it simpler and easier to use for citizens.

Jennifer Pahlka

#21. In the Federal Government, electronic records are as indispensable as their paper counterparts for documenting citizens' rights, the actions for which officials are accountable, and the nation's history.

Allen Weinstein

#22. [Government] is apprehended, not as a committee of citizens chosen to carry on the communal business of the whole population, but as a separate and autonomous corporation, mainly devoted to exploiting the population for the benefit of its own members.

H.L. Mencken

#23. The America I know is great - not because government made it great but because ordinary citizens like me, like my father and like you are given the opportunity every day to do extraordinary things.

Mia Love

#24. No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

Mark Twain

#25. Who uses funds more productively - private citizens or the government? I dare say that Warren Buffett can use his surplus funds more effectively in private business and creating jobs than the government can.

Mark Skousen

#26. By contrast, China is a repressive regime that denies its citizens the essential freedoms of religion, political dissent and representative self-government.

Todd Akin

#27. It has been well said that 'he who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.' The two are not the same, but the good citizen ought to be capable of both; he should know how to govern like a freeman, and how to obey like a freeman - these are the virtues of a citizen.

Aristotle.

#28. We must remember that democracy works when given time to develop, mature and deliver. People must have access to information for informed debate. Government institutions must treat citizens fairly, and with dignity, while responding to their needs.

Atifete Jahjaga

#29. If government goes beyond securing liberty and instead violates it through regulation, redistribution, and planning, then citizens are victims of legal plunder.

Richard Ebeling

#30. What the United States call democracy is actually a vertical model of remote governance by oligarchs - economic barons and their political representatives. The result is that citizens in the United States have little control over what the U.S. government does.

S. Brian Willson

#31. Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be - protect themselves. That's why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

Noam Chomsky

#32. History does not provide any example of capital accumulation brought about by a government. As far as governments invested in the construction of roads, railroads, and other useful public works, the capital needed was provided by the savings of individual citizens and borrowed by the government.

Ludwig Von Mises

#33. Well, again, a gun sale database is just trying to get the Department of Justice to keep track of the guns that they're purchasing and supplying to drug dealers and murderers. I mean, wow. Come on, let's get the government under control before we start restricting the rights of - innocent citizens.

John Mica

#34. Democracy is a difficult art of government, demanding of its citizens high ratios of courage and literacy, and at the moment we lack both the necessary habits of mind and a sphere of common reference.

Lewis H. Lapham

#35. No government demands so much from the citizens as democracy and none gives back so much.

James Bryce

#36. Citizens who over-rely on their government to do everything not only become dependent on their government, they end up having to do whatever the government demands. In the meantime, their initiative and self-respect are destroyed.

Charles Koch

#37. Most human-rights activists sincerely believe in the existence of human rights. No one was lying when, in 2011, the UN demanded that the Libyan government respect the human rights of its citizens, even though the UN, Libya and human rights are all figments of our fertile imaginations. Ever

Yuval Noah Harari

#38. Contrary to Eastern Europe, where the border was more porous and you could exchange information more easily, Cuba is an island. Thus, it is more isolated, and it's easier for the government to have great control over its citizens.

Luis Fortuno

#39. Failure to properly control our borders costs citizens in many ways: schools become overcrowded, medical resources are stretched too thin, other government services are overtaxed, and taxes increase further.

Zach Wamp

#40. It's the government's job to come in and help their citizens and guide their citizens to a brighter future and unfortunately in America that's not what's happening.

Cristian Machado

#41. One of the things that the court held in Brown v. Board of Education is that government can't impose a badge of inferiority on some of its citizens. Yet that is exactly what Proposition 8 does with respect to gay and lesbian couples in California.

David Boies

#42. Under a democratical government the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty; and those powers will be first abused, and afterwards lost, if they are committed to an unwieldy multitude.

Edward Gibbon

#43. Money power means budget power and it is folly to imagine that the citizen can control government unless he can control its budget.

E.C. Riegel

#44. Accordingly, it is our task to ensure that the Government formulates policies that foster the continued development of the IT sector while also providing for citizens' access to technology and opportunity for economic advancement.

Tim Holden

#45. The government's objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.

Peter Fraser

#46. It is unclear how disarming law-abiding citizens would better protect them from the dangers and threats posed by those who would flout the law. It is at just such times that the constitutional right to self-defense is most precious and must be protected from government overreach.

Rick Scott

#47. We have an opportunity, but we have an obligation to senior citizens and to the younger people who are entering the workforce today to help ensure that they are going to be able to trust the government to have a workable program that benefits them as well.

Thad Cochran

#48. What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side. All the buyers are on the corporations' side. And the bureaucrats in the Administration don't think the government belongs to the people.

Ralph Nader

#49. This election is a critical step in that overall plan - transforming the Iraqi government into a fully constitutional one, able to secure its own borders and ensure the safety of its citizens.

John M. McHugh

#50. If the government of this country tramples the faith and values of its citizens, history will hold those in power responsible for the violent convulsions that follow.

Randall Terry

#51. The citizens of Love Canal provided an example of how a blue-collar community with few resources can win against great odds (a multi-billion-dollar international corporation and an unresponsive government), using the power of the people in our democratic system.

Lois Gibbs

#52. In order to restore security for Israeli citizens, every home, mother and child in Israel, and to establish a stable and strong government that will unite the nation ... I hereby declare my candidacy for the Likud party leadership and premiership of Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu

#53. And we're to accept that the government can dictate the moral beliefs of all its citizens?

William Leisner

#54. Liberals fostered the subsidies that have converted so many citizens to helplessness. They have made high taxes and big government a way of life. They have corrupted the politicians into believing that in order to be elected to office, they must dispense benefits.

James Cook

#55. Our government is operating within an unprecedented revenue shortfall and that we have an obligation to all citizens of the province to manage our finances responsibly. And that's what we're going to do.

Rachel Notley

#56. I'm eternally grateful to fate and the citizens of Russia that they've trusted me to be the head of the Russian government.

Vladimir Putin

#57. Self-government will not work unless the citizens bear the responsibility to vote in such a way that continues their freedoms and their ability to have free elections, that continues their economic prosperity. They have to vote in a way that does not trade the future for the present. This

Eric Metaxas

#58. Conservatives need to know how important it is to fill out the census. It is one of the only things our Constitution specifically asks of U.S. citizens and boycotting will just help liberals expand government even further.

Patrick McHenry

#59. One legislator accused me of having a 19th century attitude on law and order. That is a totally false charge. I have an 18th century attitude. That is when the Founding Fathers made it clear that the safety of law abiding citizens should be one of government's primary concerns.

Jeffrey Gitomer

#60. The feelings, sentiments, values and responses of our children, or of any citizen, are none of the government's damned business. That we must support a government agency that gives itself to the emotional and ideological manipulation of citizens is infamous.

Richard Mitchell

#61. None of this is fair to you. And should it continue, it will make it more difficult to keep attracting the kind of driven, patriotic, idealist Americans to public service that our citizens deserved and that our system of self-government demands.

Barack Obama

#62. The American Dream was not about government's taking huge sums of money (under the label of "taxation") from citizens by force. The American Dream was about individualism and the opportunity to achieve success without interference from others.

Robert Ringer

#63. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen ...

Zbigniew Brzezinski

#64. There's huge opportunities to continue to improve efficiency in the way the government operates and improve the way government provides services to its citizens.

Steve Daines

#65. [The Bytyqi Brothers were] American citizens and we have been seeking answers to why no one's been held accountable for these atrocities. [Family members] expect our government to do everything we can.

Ben Cardin

#66. What we need is to make our senior citizens feel secure once more with their own Social Security and Medicare. But going forward, we need to personalize that program in a way that the government can't go in and raid it any more.

Sharron Angle

#67. Laws and regulations are supposed to restrict the kind of surveillance governments do. In fact, the U.S. government is quite restricted in what kind of surveillance they can do on U.S. citizens. The problem is that 96 percent of the planet is not U.S. citizens.

Mikko Hypponen

#68. Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution.

William Earl Maxwell

#69. Our citizens are tired of big government raising their taxes and cooking up new ways to micromanage their lives, our citizens are tired of big government killing jobs with their do-gooder policies. In short the people are Fed Up!

Rick Perry

#70. Left to me, the whole purpose of government is for the security of the citizens, like the security of lives and property.

Ibrahim Babangida

#71. We are giving the citizens of Poland a sense that a reasonable and predictable government is ruling here.

Donald Tusk

#72. Thousands of civilians have lost their lives to terrorist attacks inside Pakistan, and thousands more will - because, unlike the Pakistani government, which has no coherent policy to deal with the radicals, the Taliban have one to deal with Pakistan and its citizens.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

#73. The government can give citizens opportunity and it's their responsibility to take advantage of it.

Michael Mandelbaum

#74. The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#75. The siren song of redistribution of wealth by centralized government never ceases for those who seek irreversible and unusurpable control over the lives and liberties of private citizens.

Josh Jones

#76. A timeline for bringing U.S. troops home that is negotiated with the Iraqi government would also boost the Iraqi government's legitimacy and claim to self-rule, and force the Iraqi government to take responsibility for itself and its citizens.

Peter DeFazio

#77. Hence, in a constitutional government the fighting-men have the supreme power, and those who possess arms are the citizens

Aristotle.

#78. All of us should have free choice when it comes to patriotic displays ... a government wisely acting within its bounds will earn loyalty and respect from its citizens. A government dare not demand the same.

Jesse Ventura

#79. Democracy, though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillontines whoever is individual, superior, or just different.

Peter Viereck

#80. Government does not cause affluence. Citizens of totalitarian countries have plenty of government and nothing of anything else.

P. J. O'Rourke

#81. A government that does not trust it's law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms is itself unworthy of trust.

James Madison

#82. Actually, there is only one first question of government, and it is How should we live? or What kind of people do we want our citizens to be?

George Will

#83. The sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

Larry Flynt

#84. The British government had become fearful of how its citizens would react to a wave of Jewish refugees from Germany, and had clamped down on immigration.

Thomas Harding

#85. Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens ... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk ...

Charles M. Blow

#86. Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spiritous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90
and all this without taxes.

Bill Bryson

#87. We need citizens who are less concerned about what their government can do for them, and more concerned about what they can do for the nation.

Warren G. Harding

#88. Government is not a substitute for people, but simply the instrument through which they act. And if the individual fails to do his duty as a citizen, government becomes a very deadly instrument indeed.

Bernard Baruch

#89. only a book could be written to help the average citizen penetrate and understand a dream's mysteries. Officially, the government took no position on what occurred while its citizens were asleep, but isn't something of the dreamer to be found in his dream? And

Adam Johnson

#90. We need to understand that we as citizens and as a government in any community throughout this country have no more important obligation than to educate those who are going to replace us.

Colin Powell

#91. You know what, citizens? If you don't have a gun - I'm telling you as a Christian chaplain - sell your clothes, and buy a gun. It's time! The government persecution will be coming against you, and you needs to arm yourselves ...

Gordon Klingenschmitt

#92. Public opinion, though slow as lava, in the end forces governments towards more sanity, more justice. My heroes and heroines are all private citizens.

Martha Gellhorn

#93. We must protect the right of citizens to practice their religions freely. As president, I will support federal and state-level legislation like the Religious Freedom Restoration Acts that protect citizens and their churches from government intrusion.

Carly Fiorina

#94. private philanthropy is no substitution for hard-fought battles over labour laws and social security, in part because philanthropy can be retracted on a whim, while elected officials, at least in theory, have citizens to answer to.

Linsey McGoey

#95. It is interesting to note that an overwhelming majority of citizens in the world's three largest democracies have different religions: India (81 percent Hindu), the United States (76 percent Christian), and Indonesia (87 percent Muslim). Two of them have elected women as leaders of their government.

Jimmy Carter

#96. A nation's domestic and foreign policies and actions should be derived from the same standards of ethics, honesty and morality which are characteristic of the individual citizens of the nation.

Jimmy Carter

#97. Coolidge believed that government officials who tell themselves that spending benefits the economy delude themselves and the citizens. Government budgets promote human freedom.

Amity Shlaes

#98. When government taxes and regulates, what is seen are the visible effects of government contracts, grants, and subsidies. What is not seen are all of the property, business, and jobs that would have been created if citizens were left with the right to choose.

John Pugsley

#99. Let's not forget that one poll after another clearly demonstrates that well over 50% of Russian citizens still wants both socialism and the USSR back. And the Russian government is listening.

Andre Vltchek

#100. What are we going to do if citizens are disarmed, and the government doesn't obey its own laws?

Jeff Cooper