Angus King Quotes

Safety and security are the most basic job of government. I understand that - both as a mayor who works every day to secure public safety and reduce crime, and also as someone who deployed in uniform to Afghanistan because I believed joining the military was part of my duty to help keep my country safe.

If your basic premise about the fundamental purpose of our government is that it must provide for the common defense, then no other position is possible.

Left to me, the whole purpose of government is for the security of the citizens, like the security of lives and property.

We know that the most fundamental responsibility of our Federal Government is to ensure the safety of its people and to protect and ensure our National security. And clearly port security has been left in limbo.

The job of the government isn't to go around and try and make people sacrifice, it's to try and make people free. The reason why we have a national defense is to protect our freedoms.

It is the government's fundamental duty to ensure the security of every individual citizen.

We have no more fundamental obligation in government than to ensure the safety of our citizens.

Of all the tasks of government, the most basic is to protect its citizens from violence.

No government ought to guarantee perfect security because no government can provide it.

Safety has been my top legislative priority. I'm driven by the idea that safety is really a core function of government.

An individual citizen cannot protect himself from the powers of large corporations or external governments. It is the responsibility of the government to protect its citizens.

My thinking is, government is really there to do the things that people absolutely can't do for themselves. And that's mostly involved with the things that might kill you. And what might kill me? The environment and terrorism.

This is government's primary function - to keep us safe - and when large percentages in America don't feel safe, they start asking: What am I paying my taxes for? What is government all about?

I've voted for Republicans who were strong on defense, who believed in a free and open economy but who also understood that there's a place for government in our lives, that government has a responsibility to those of our citizens who are in need and those of our citizens who are needy of health care.

The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.

We have to find ways in which, collectively, we agree there's some things that government needs to do to help protect us, that in this age of non-state actors who can amass great power, I want my government - and I think the German people should want their government - to be able to find out if a terrorist organization has access to a weapon of mass destruction that might go off in the middle of Berlin.

We have responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.

There is a general rule, which includes all the duties of a sovereign, and by which he may easily judge how to proceed under every circumstance. Let the safety of the people be the supreme law.

The word SECURITY is the first and last chapter of the constitution of France.

The object of government is the protection of person, property, and reputation from the foes which assail them. Government may do other things: it may carry the mails, run the express, own and operate the railroads; but its fundamental function is to furnish protection from open violence or secret fraud. If it adequately protects person, property, and reputation, it is a just government, though it do nothing else; if it fails to protect these primary rights, if the person is left to defend himself, his property, his reputation by his own strong arm, there is no government.

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear--kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it

Our mission is to bring awareness to any issue which challenges the security, sovereignty, or domestic tranquility of our beloved nation.

A commander in chief signs on not to reflect public opinion but to defend the country and the constitution..

“Is it unusual?... There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander-in-chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.

The chief duty of our federal government is the safety and security of the American people.