Jack Schlossberg Quotes

Ever since I arrived in Washington in April 2009, I have been fighting for more transparency and accountability in government.

You’re doing the people’s business and they have a right to know.

I want my government to be transparent.

Remarkably, governments are beginning to embrace the idea that nothing enhances democracy more than giving voice and information to everybody in the country. Why not open their books if they have nothing to hide?

The movement towards radical transparency and accountability has been gaining steam for several decades.

Can the public business be thus transacted and in secret?

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.

Access to government-held information allows citizens to hold their government accountable for policy decisions and public expenditures…. Access to information bridges the gap between state and society ….

Our government cannot function cloaked in secrecy. It cannot function unless officials tell the truth.

The overarching purpose of access to information legislation … is to facilitate democracy. It does so in two related ways. It helps to ensure first, that citizens have the information required to participate meaningfully in the democratic process, and secondly, that politicians and bureaucrats remain accountable to the citizenry.

… a guarantee of public access to government information is indispensable in the long run for any democratic society.... if officials make public only what they want citizens to know, then publicity becomes a sham and accountability meaningless.

The government being the people’s business, it necessarily follows that its operations should be at all times open to public view.

We are world leaders in open and transparent government.

Obama's openness is a welcome change from his predecessor, who went all the way to the Supreme Court to hide the RSVP list for a single policy meeting. And transparency is intrinsically good, since in a democracy, very little government activity is legitimately secret.

Open government is, within limits, an ideal that we all share. U.S. President Barack Obama endorsed it when he took office in January 2009.

Government must be a transparent garment which tightly clings to the people's body.

In my first year as governor, we solved some of the problems that had begun to undermine the Open Records Act. We gave the act teeth by providing criminal penalties for knowing violations.

I think there's been a decline in the public's access to what's being done with their tax dollars, what's being done in their name. I hope that that will be repaired.

Access to presidential materials should be as wide as possible.

In order to encourage the free interchange of opinion and the enlightenment of the public, every Swedish subject shall have free access to official documents.

Why does the White House sometimes seem so determined to close the door on the people's right to know what their government is doing?

The people have the right to know what their Agents are doing or have done, and it should not be in the option of the Legislature to conceal their proceedings.

We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute.

The American public has a right to know what's going on.

The only way we are held accountable is if people know what government is doing.