"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side."
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Government quotes
Government
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Government quotes (page 45 of 568)
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"I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going."
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"Nothing rectifies out-of-control market failures like a healthy dose of government intervention and mountains of bureaucracy."
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"Religion, too, is a weapon. What manner of weapon is religion when it becomes the government?"
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"The royalists of the economic order have conceded that political freedom was the business of the government, but they have maintained that economic slavery was nobody's business. They granted that the government could protect the citizen in his right to vote, but they denied that the government could do anything to protect the citizen in his right to work and his right to live. Today we stand committed to the proposition that freedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is guaranteed equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place."
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"In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone."
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"Extensive violations of human rights (torture, forced reduction of living standards for much of the population, police-sponsored death squads, destruction of representative institutions or of independent unions, etc.) are directly correlated with US government support. The linkage is not accidental; rather it is systematic. The reason is obvious enough. Client fascism often improves the business climate for American corporations, quite generally the guiding factor in foreign policy."
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"I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down."
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"[John Brown's] zeal in the cause of freedom was infinitely superior to mine. Mine was as the taper light, his was as the burning sun... I could speak for the slave. John Brown could fight for the slave."
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"A Patriot is someone who stands for his country always, and for his government when it is deserved."
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"Revolt is not reform, and one revolutionary administration is not good government."
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"On the same day I was sworn in as Prime Minister of Canada, I announced the most sweeping reform ever undertaken in the structure of our federal government."
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"There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned."
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"Any participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful."
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"You have to have a government that does give both money and energy to function in a leadership role modeling giving for the people. Government is supposed to lead by example in many cases."
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"What patient can trust the knowledge of a physician without reputation or furniture, in a period when publicity is all-powerful and when the government gilds the lamp posts on the Place de la Concorde in order to dazzle the poor?"
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"Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the general government has just discovered women."
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"No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious & charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful."
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"The history of governmentally established religion, both in England and in this country, showed that whenever government had allied itself with one particular form of religion, the inevitable result had been that it had incurred the hatred, disrespect and even contempt of those who held contrary beliefs."
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"I am for the First Amendment from the first word to the last. I believe it means what it says."
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