Jon Meacham Quotes

Government has a habit of blaming the private sector for its own failings while taking credit for advances we in fact owe to the private sector.

The government’s role is to motivate the private sector, to assure that it performs in a way which serves the public interest.

Reality is complex, but the politicians and the public demand simple answers.

The truth is complicated, and few people are actually monsters.

Reality is far more complex and messy than many of the grander themes and explanations would have us believe.

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world.

Washington State has a strong tradition of a positive relationship - positive working relationship between labor and management, whether in the private sector or the public sector. It needs to continue to be that way.

It is only fair to expect public employees like me and others in the public sector to pay something close to what our neighbors and our fellow citizens do in the private sector.

Somehow, failures in the public sector are always judged as systematic. The private sector thus exists to ride to the rescue - and their failures are only judged anomalies. A pretty nice arrangement for investors. The only people who suffer are the citizens.

Economic management involves the operation of economic frameworks in real time - for example, in the private sector, the management of complex financial institutions or, in the public sector, the day-to-day supervision of those institutions.

There isn't one thing the federal government does that anybody in Big Business would emulate, at least not in the profit sector.

Sometimes we tend to focus more on the personalities and the conflicts, and it really caricatures the issues.

I'm going to go after crime and corruption wherever it is. But I did focus particularly on the need to restore public confidence in essential institutions of both the public and private sector.

Everything is more complicated than it looks to most people.

We are a mixed economy. We will remain a mixed economy. The public and private sector will continue to play a very important role. The private sector in our country has very ample scope and I am confident that India's entrepreneurs have the capacity, and the will to rise to the occasion.

There is definitely a need for increasing capacity in higher education; a large part of this is being met in the technical education segment by the private sector and in the non-technical by the state sector. In the public sector, we will do whatever we can afford.

Conservatives may worship Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' but for Obama, the helping hand comes in large measure from the public, not the private sector. To call this 'socialism' is to do violence to the word and to the concept. To call it 'un-American' is a smear.

There is an element of luck, there is an element of trial and error, sometimes you fail, sometimes you succeed. It's not as beautifully simple as it may seem when we are talking about it.

I think that anybody that stays in school, gets good grades, pays the price, I think we are wealthy enough in the public and the private sector in America to make sure that every child in America that wants to continue their education, they should be able to do that.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

The public sector can serve as a catalyst for changing attitudes in the private sector.

Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we will end up in affluent misery.

No centralized bureaucracy, or so-called "paternal government," yet invented on earth, has been anything but a failure, or is it like to be anything else

The best minds are not in government. If they were, business would hire them away.

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