Charlie Pierce Quotes

We need government to do for the people what they cannot do for themselves.

That’s the function of government—to do for people what they cannot do for themselves.

We also need to find a language capable of defending government as an element of the common good, one that does not define itself as both a punishing and corporate state. This is not merely a matter of redefining sovereignty, but also rethinking what is distinctive about the social state, social responsibility, and the common good.

Some things are too important to be left to the private sector.

The happiness of society is the end of government.

Law principally and properly seeks the common good. Planning for the common good is the task of the whole people or of someone ruling in the person of the whole people. Thus lawmaking is the task of the whole charge of the whole people; for in all other matters direction toward an end is the function of him to whom the end belongs.

A body politic is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good.

Formerly government was the responsibility of people; now people were the responsibility of government.

The spirit of America has nurtured responsibility and community unlike any other country.

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists - to protect them and to promote their common welfare - all else is lost.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

Let each person do his or her part. If one citizen is unwilling to participate, all of us are going to suffer. For the American idea, though it is shared by all of us, is realized in each one of us.

Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.

What it missing, I think, is this notion of the common good.

When you're fund-raising for schools, then something's wrong. We seem to have lost some sort of sense of what the common good is, and if you don't have a sense of what the common good is, then at least give to what you think your specific goods are.

Though the people support the government, the government should not support the people.

Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and trustees are created for the benefit of the public.

Government is a progressive instrument for the common good.

The government is just us.

All government is intended for the benefit of the people.

Government is not the enemy. Government is simply a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely.

The only orthodox object of the institution of government is to secure the greatest degree of happiness possible to the general mass of those associated under it.

The Administration of Government, is nothing else but the Attendance of the Trustees of the People upon the Interest and Affairs of the People

That is how our nation has been built - by a partnership between citizen and government, between individual and society, between a family and the wider community.