Armando Iannucci Quotes

I'm not sure the public knows what it wants.

Isn't it only appropriate that, in return for the free use of the public spectrum, broadcasters provide something substantial, something that wouldn't otherwise be provided by marketplace competition?

I saw how the regulation I called for made things worse, didn't help consumers and simple competition was better. And I started praising business and occasionally criticizing regulation.

We are a coalition government, and that limits our options in some ways. Privatization happens to be one such area.

The course of business shapes public opinion.

The perception of broadcasters as community trustees should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants.

It satisfies the public clamor for a government supervision of the railroads at the same time that the supervision is almost entirely nominal.

You have the socialist parties ruling Denmark putting in conservative policies because the conservatives control the media and the public discourse.

I'm all for the Fairness Doctrine, whatever that is.

When people choose their occupations according to what the public wants and is willing to pay for, that is “greed,” but when the public is forced to pay for what the anointed want done, that is “public service.”

If we give the impression that every one of our technological advances in this country, be it Microsoft, Google, Yahoo or anything else, are really an instrument of our intelligence agencies, how far do you think they are really going to go?

In a mixed economy the public sector remains constrained by the overarching requirement of maintaining an efficient and profitable private sector.

Every individual necessarily labors to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it.... He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

There are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.

So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another.

The phrase 'private option' itself has become politically toxic.

There's a lot to learn from President Clinton. It kills me as a strong Republican saying it, but he was the most effective president during my lifetime. And when business got out of line, he smacked them.

I never understood the idea of canceling a show when you don't like the politics of a specific state.

Commercial television has underestimated the intelligence of the public.

What would annoy the most people most often? That is the true left-wing test of government intervention.

The very nature of the government, and the direction it's been heading in for the past 40 years, is one of contrived government solutions to all the problems in the United States.

Republicans like to accuse Democrats of trying to 'pick winners and losers.' They say we should run government 'like a business' and let 'the market' decide important matters. When it comes to the declining fortunes of dirty fuels like coal, however, they quickly they abandon these principles.

The problem is that once we focus on economic policy, much that is not science comes into play. Politics becomes involved, and political posturing is amply rewarded by public attention.

I am one who believes that the market, properly incentivized, can consistently outperform government regulation on achieving objectives.

We think the government is running the country, but it is just a policymaker. Unknowingly, people are inviting the government to run their lives. The only business of the government is to come up with the right policies.