Ari Fleischer Quotes

As long as the government's actions are secret, it cannot be held accountable. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people.

I had always believed government was not a fungus: It could survive in sunshine.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency.

The press never accepts at face value that the President is taking a certain action because he wants to create jobs or because he believes that it is in the best interests of the American people or that he is genuinely committed to making life better for people.

No one in government should ever think that the citizens they work for can't or won't scrutinize their actions.

All officers of the Intelligence Community, and especially its most senior officer, must conduct themselves in a manner that earns and retains the public trust. The American people are uncomfortable with government activities that do not take place in the open, subject to public scrutiny and review.

The problem is that the American public is suspicious of executive power shrouded in secrecy. In the absence of an official picture of what our government is doing, and by what authority, many in the public fill the void by envisioning the worst.

One of the reasons the American public holds unelected government officials in such low esteem is that they are never held accountable for their failures.

And the commitment that I've been giving to the Australian people is that there'll be no surprises and no excuses under a Coalition government.

No government can continue good, but under the control of the people.

The government being the peoples business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to the public view. Publicity is therefore as essential to honest administration as freedom of speech is to representative government. Equal rights to all and special privileges to none is the maxim which should control in all departments of government.

Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.

Transparency in government leads to reduced corruption.

People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

Thoughtful criticism and close scrutiny of all government officials by the press and the public are an important part of our democratic society.

You know, my sense is that transparency is a good thing. It also has to be what - private information should be safeguarded so that individuals are not caught in the cross-fire here. But I think that our government, and people who are working in our government who should have been on the record - Hillary Clinton, remember, deleted half of her email, which is like, what's wrong with this picture?

Since I've been in the Senate, is that my work with people like Tom Coburn on opening up transparency in government, making sure that every dollar the federal government spends that's out there - that that's all posted on a searchable database on the Internet.

A government operates and acts differently than a company. So all we want to do is get some transparency here and then determine if the deal should go forward.

The people of Zimbabwe have a responsibility to ensure that the government that they elected behaves properly.

The fight for reform comes down to a simple goal: giving our citizens the confidence that government serves the people first and the people only.

Dishonesty in government is the business of every citizen. It is not enough to do your own job. There's no particular virtue in that. Democracy isn't a gift. It's a responsibility.

I promised to run the most open and transparent administration in Britain. That is why, with this brutally honest and unprecedented progress report, I am determined to level with Londoners.

It's my father's legacy. My father's view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they're up to.

We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government.

Government is too big and too important to be left to the politicians.