government behavior Quotes

Governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.

What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

The Constitution was not written to restrain the citizen's behavior, it was writtne to restrain the government's behavior.

Governments are composed of human beings, and all of the frailties that humans possess are absorbed into these governments and become active within these governments. Hatred, anger, jealousy, fear, greed, distrust and the whole host of afflictions that humans must bear, lurk just beneath the surface of civility displayed by 'government.'

Government is like physics, you know - for every action, there's a reaction.

The federal government does not trample in jackboots those with whom it does business. It wraps them in cotton batting and, when they express ingratitude, apologizes profusely.

A government that is brutal to its own people will be brutal to its neighbors and its enemies.

You've got the whole stuff with transgender toilets and stuff like that - that's no way for a government to behave. We're supposed to be against ISIS, so why are we trying to slowly introduce a country-club version of Sharia law in America, you know? It doesn't make any real sense at all. I think there's going to be a lot of energy, there is already a lot of reaction against that - people are prepared to really stand up and be counted for democracy, and in the process to find out what is and what isn't.

There is no way to avoid the reality that the American government in the past years has been the most spectacularly hypocrisy-driven government in the world. We rival the Soviet Union in some stages, in some ways, in hypocrisy.

I must confess the activities of the UK governments for the past couple of years have been watched with frank admiration and amazement by Lord Vetinari. Outright theft as a policy had never occurred to him.

All governments ... sometimes do strange things.

Each successive Labour Government has been the most rapacious, doctrinaire and unpatriotic conspiracy to be seen this side of the Iron Curtain.

It is not the opinions or the vices of private individuals that are harmful to the State, but rather the behavior of public figures.

There's a lot of middle school behavior in Washington, D.C. I look at that and I say, 'I've seen that before,' it was just with a 14-year-old.

Governments never do any great good things from mere principle, from mere love of justice ... You expect too much of human nature when you expect that.

The biggest change in the government's behavior has been because of TV and its ability to show to the world what has happened in this community... that's the biggest change. But without TV... the separation between the government and the people would be much worse than it is.

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

It matters more how governments behave than how big they are.

Governments acting in a crisis are guided by questions of expediency, and moral considerations are given very little weight, and that America is no different from any other nation in this respect.

The government are behaving like a bevy of maiden aunts who have fallen among buccaneers.

Disciplined governments do not engage in the economic equivalent of binge eating followed by crash dieting.

The government under Manmohan Singh is treating all political partners in a dignified manner.

Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.

The State always moves slowly and grudgingly towards any purpose that accrues to society's advantage, but moves rapidly and with alacrity towards one that accrues to its own advantage; nor does it ever move towards social purposes on its own initiative, but only under heavy pressure, while its motion towards anti-social purposes is self-sprung.