Top 100 Quotes About Government Officials
#1. Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#2. Mr Zhu says what makes him a diaosi is that he is the son of factory workers. He is not fu er dai - second-generation rich - or guan er dai - the son of powerful government officials (it does not escape a diaosi's notice that those two categories often overlap).
Anonymous
#3. Disclosure of private e-mails from government officials has been a legal issue in many states.
Bill Dedman
#4. When I wrote my eighth thriller, 'Inside Out,' in 2009, the villains were a group of CIA and other government officials who colluded to destroy a series of tapes depicting Americans torturing war-on-terror prisoners.
Barry Eisler
#5. Acting Government officials, they said they wanted - they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store, and have me die in the shower.
Edward Snowden
#6. If the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) raises the hackles of the conspiracy theorists, the Bilderberg meetings must induce apocalyptic visions of omnipotent international bankers plotting with unscrupulous government officials to impose cunning schemes on an ignorant and unsuspecting world.
David Rockefeller
#7. You elected government officials to make decisions and it's about time they started making good ones.
Bob Riley
#8. Iran's strong logic and firm diplomacy is the guideline for all government officials in negotiations on country's peaceful nuclear program with foreigners, quite resolutely.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
#9. WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.
Jesse Ventura
#10. If the law is upheld only by government officials, then all law is at an end.
Herbert Hoover
#11. I took a hasty trip to Germany, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and England to talk to the officials of each Government about their pension provisions, and to talk to the responsible ministers in each country about the political "whys" of their legislation.
Judy LaMarsh
#12. I think Syria is often covered by phone. You have to talk to activists. You have to try to read the tea leaves. You have to talk to government officials. It's remote-control reporting in a way.
Anthony Shadid
#13. Our people still need support. Support us through writing your government officials. We are still on the verge of extinction, with continued injustices brought against us.
Leonard Peltier
#14. 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
#15. Nothing short of a federal investigation can begin to disclose the abuses which have woven a fine web of mutually implicating relationships between businessmen and government officials.
Ralph Nader
#16. I like BuzzFeed, and I understand the pressure that online reporters are under. But I think everyone agrees that, despite all the awesome kitten gifs, they're still obligated to be skeptical of government officials and ask the right questions.
Michael Moore
#17. These international bankers and Rockefeller Standard Oil interests control the majority of newspapers and the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of public office officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government.
Theodore Roosevelt
#18. 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
#19. The politician and the government expert receive their revenues, not from service voluntarily purchased on the market, but from a compulsory levy on the populace. These officials, therefore, wholly lack the pecuniary incentive to care about serving the public properly and competently.
Murray Rothbard
#20. The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
Bruce Jackson
#21. At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
Louis D. Brandeis
#22. It is always unconscionable for the government to punish people for expressing an idea merely because government officials - or the majority of citizens - decide that those ideas are 'dangerous' or 'wrong.' That is a power nobody ought to possess.
Glenn Greenwald
#23. In poor countries, officials receive explicit bribes; in D.C. they get the sophisticated, implicit, unspoken promise to work for large corporations
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#24. There is no central government database that allows officials to monitor water tests by local systems.
Charles Duhigg
#25. Our Founders explicitly designed our system so that all powers not delegated to the federal government (education included) fell to the states or the people; they believed that parents, not government officials, have the moral right to decide what their children are taught.
Glenn Beck
#26. On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered.
Scott Anderson
#27. A secret history of the US Government's Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a safe haven in the US for Nazis and their collaborators after WW2 and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.
James Morcan
#28. A passport, as I'm sure you know, is a document that one shows to government officials whenever one reaches a border between two countries, so that the official can learn who you are, where you were born, and how you look when photographed unflatteringly.
Lemony Snicket
#29. The Europeans and Americans residing in the town of Zanzibar are either Government officials, independent merchants, or agents for a few great mercantile houses in Europe and America.
Henry Morton Stanley
#30. For most Americans, Friday afternoons are filled with positive anticipation of the weekend. In Washington, it's where government officials dump stories they want to bury. Good news gets dropped on Monday so bureaucrats can talk about it all week.
John Sununu
#31. I was not born into a rich family or a family of government officials.
Chen Guangbiao
#32. The same reasoning applies to civilian government officials whenever they are retained in excessive numbers and do not perform services for the community reasonably equivalent to the remuneration they receive.
Henry Hazlitt
#33. Many senior government officials, CIA, FBI, counter terrorism officials - when they look back at the decade, they effectively conclude that the United States overreacted after 9/11.
Richard Engel
#34. People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them.
Ronald Reagan
#35. 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
#36. There has never been a period in American history when it made sense to be anti-government. We may not like certain elected officials, laws, or government programs; but government simply provides the framework with which the people provide order and necessities for themselves.
Michael Douglas Gilbert
#37. Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.
Glenn Greenwald
#38. The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw
#39. One of the little-celebrated powers of Presidents (and other high government officials) is to listen to their critics with just enough sympathy to ensure their silence.
John Kenneth Galbraith
#40. Officials of governments that use or produce landmines should be forced to see the reality of how landmines hurt people and make them suffer, because this would surely make them stop.
Jackie Chan
#41. Well, a special screening was set up for government officials, so they didn't have to see the experience of going to see the film. They certainly aren't going to the projects to see for themselves the situation.
Mathieu Kassovitz
#42. Local authorities keep an eye on proceedings. The Saigon Protestant Church in Ho Chi Minh City, for instance, one of the biggest in the country, has to submit a list of its event schedules, financial records and appointments of Church leaders to government officials for their prior approval.
Insight Guides
#43. All banks should be under government control. Deposits guaranteed, dividends reduced, officials turned into state servants taking their orders from Washington ...
Margaret Ayer Barnes
#44. The question, then, for Western companies, as much as for Western governments, is to decide whose side they are on: the Chinese officials who like to define their culture in a paternalistic, authoritarian way, or the large number of Chinese who have their own ideas about freedom.
Ian Buruma
#45. 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
#46. Corruption is uniquely reprehensible in a democracy because it violates the system's first principle, which we all learned back in the sunshiny days of elementary school: that the government exist to serve the public, not particular companies or individuals or even elected officials.
Thomas Frank
#47. History teaches that the overwhelming majority of elected officials follow movement builders outside government when it comes to the new and risky ... Once you recognize it, demand it and reward it, it will happen.
Eric Schneiderman
#48. Ours is a government of checks and balances. The Mafia and crooked businessmen make out checks, and the politicians and other compromised officials improve their bank balances.
Steve Allen
#49. The balance between faith and reason is for the determination of each individual, and of the people as a whole, not of unauthorized government officials uttering impious humbug as they arbitrarily try to define that balance.
Conrad Black
#50. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#51. The federal government has failed us, so we, the elected officials of small-town America, are getting tough with illegal immigration.
Lou Barletta
#52. What is politically defined as economic planning is the forcible superseding of other people's plans by Government officials.
Thomas Sowell
#53. From the age of 8, I was running media campaigns on global issues back home in Australia. I was ever so slightly precocious. I would meet with senior Australian government officials, including the prime minister and foreign minister, proposing various solutions to third-world debt and malnutrition.
Jeremy Heimans
#54. Many Communist government officials have a rigid, dictatorial power, but they live in constant suspicion and fear of anything that might undermine the power they have.
Nhat Hanh
#55. By making the government a combination of elected officials and citizen-backed initiatives and referenda, there can truly be a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Victoria Stoklasa
#56. I knew President Yeltsin well. He would never have tolerated government officials demonstratively showing off the millions they acquired through corruption, the way it's done today.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky
#57. The number of men sitting at Atlanta and Leavenworth for revolting against the extortions of the government is always ten times as great as the number of government officials condemned for oppressing the taxpayers to their own gain. (Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy, pp.
Murray N. Rothbard
#58. Edward Conard's book represents the most cogent and persuasive analysis of the Financial Crisis to date. It is deeper and likely more accurate than what we have seen so far from journalists, academ- ics, and particularly former government officials.
Andrei Shleifer
#59. Nothing is worse, or more of a breach of the social contract between citizen and state, than for government officials, bureaucrats and agencies to waste the money entrusted to them by the people they serve.
Bob Riley
#60. Through a blog, an ordinary citizen such as myself can use the Internet, this thing invented by Albert Gore, to talk from my house to the U.S. capital and to make use of my right to point out to government officials and to the media when they are wrong.
John Jay Hooker
#61. Almost no one will accept responsibility for his or her role in precipitating a crisis: not leveraged speculators, not willfully blind leaders of financial institutions, and certainly not regulators, government officials, ratings agencies or politicians.
Seth Klarman
#62. I have an interest in getting government officials to talk to me about National Security affairs. You know, that's my bread and butter; that's how I make my living.
Scott Shane
#63. Public corruption is the FBI's top criminal priority. The threat - which involves the corruption of local, state, and federally elected, appointed, or contracted officials - strikes at the heart of government, eroding public confidence and undermining the strength of our democracy.
James Comey
#64. It is infinitely better to rely on the pursuit of economic interest by landowners or street companies than to depend on the dubious "altruism" of bureaucrats and government officials.
Murray N. Rothbard
#65. State courts usually rule that correspondence between government officials, about government business, are public records, whether they use their government e-mail accounts or private ones.
Bill Dedman
#66. Unwarranted search and seizure by the government officials was unacceptable to the American revolutionaries. Shouldn't it be unacceptable in the digital age, too?
Heather Brooke
#67. Most government officials are rushing headlong to solve the problems of 50 years ago, with their ears assailed by the sound of snails whizzing by.
Eric Johnston
#68. Firstly, the current government officials are in power for their currency, but I'm informing you for your new currency.
Jared Lee Loughner
#69. We continue to see undeniable evidence that abuse and torture has been widespread and systematic, yet high-level government officials have not been held accountable for creating the policies that led to these atrocities.
Anthony Romero
#70. There will always be bosses, pastors and government officials over us - and this structure is actually a good thing. It is not our job to derail it or work around it.
David Pritchard
#71. The U.S. government officials lie when they talk about human rights. They're a bunch of hypocrites and liars.
You can't take it seriously.
Eqbal Ahmad
#72. Morality in government begins with officials using words as honestly as possible to describe the truth.
David Gergen
#73. There is a group of entrepreneurs pushing the envelope, government officials that are making significant changes despite the odds, and visionary writers, academics, and colleagues whose work confirms, amplifies, and stretches my own thinking.
Robin Chase
#74. Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not - and is not - a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a "barbed-wire entanglement" designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.
Jacob G. Hornberger
#75. Every time I travel, government TSA officials seem to recognize that I'm a Muslim and 'randomly' pull me aside for 'special treatment'. My sincere hope and prayer is that, on the Day of Judgment, my Lord's angels also recognize me as a Muslim and pull me aside for special treatment
Abu Ammaar Yasir Qadhi
#76. Why is our (US) government the only one in the civilized world with a stupid, short-term energy policy? Why do our elected officials consider a European or Japanese-type energy tax not only unpassable but undiscussable?
Donella Meadows
#77. The government of Sudan, employing a back channel direct from its president to the Central Intelligence Agency, offered in the early spring of 1996 to arrest Osama bin Laden and place him in Saudi custody, according to officials and former officials in all three countries.
Barton Gellman
#78. The American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country.
Michael Parenti
#79. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.
Thomas Sowell
#80. Unfortunately for many Aboriginal people, of course, they've been in the situation of being herded on government reserves. Their own responsibility's been assumed by Protectors of Aborigines and by government officials and if you become part of that system, it's always difficult to break out of it.
Lowitja O'Donoghue
#81. 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
#82. Tell me why the limousine fleet has increased by 42 percent since Barack Obama took office. Why are we spending taxpayers' money on that? Limos should be for weddings and proms, certainly not for government officials to be riding around in.
Mark Neumann
#83. Widespread commercial distribution of ice was so new that 300 tons of the precious commodity melted at one port while customs officials tried to figure out how to classify it.
Bill Bryson
#84. To restore and keep the public's confidence in the integrity of their government, state government and its officials must be open, honest and transparent.
John Lynch
#85. Our elected officials would do well to remember that the most prosperous countries are those that allow consumers - not governments - to direct the use of resources. Allowing the government to pick winners and losers hurts almost everyone, especially our poorest citizens.
Charles Koch
#86. In practice, US officials seem to know better than to indulge in the patriotic myth that our constitution is the greatest system of government ever devised.
Matthew Yglesias
#87. Iowans are feeling the pinch of a big federal government, and elected officials like Bruce Braley keep championing the over reaching bureaucracy. Iowans know what is best for Iowa more than Washington politicians and bureaucrats do.
Joni Ernst
#88. read the brilliant compilation of testimonies in Leslie Kean's book: "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record." The
John DeSouza
#89. Debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open and that ... may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.
William J. Brennan
#90. I don't want to put words in Geithner's mouth, but I think he is generally against the revolving door of government officials taking jobs with companies that they have overseen or in roles that involve lobbying. At minimum, I'm pretty sure he felt that way about himself.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
#91. The people of God want pastors, not clergy acting like bureaucrats or government officials.
Pope Francis
#92. Voters cannot hold officials responsible if they do not know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what.
George Will
#93. I've said we need to look at things from the perspective of working people and taxpayers, not from the perspective of government and government officials.
Scott McCallum
#94. Despite being in public life, I value my own privacy immensely and would be as concerned as anyone else if I thought my mobile phone records could be easily available to officials across government.
David Blunkett
#95. A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.
Glenn Greenwald
#96. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme.
Glenn Greenwald
#97. I believe that a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society ... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.
Sissela Bok
#98. But there will be no justice, there will be no government of the people, by the people, and for the people, as long as the government and its officials permit bribery in any form.
John Jay Hooker
#99. Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.
Jimmy Carter
#100. For students, understanding the separate and unique functions of each branch of government can help them understand how different kinds of government officials can help solve different kinds of problems.
Sandra Day O'Connor
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