The passion for office among members of Congress is very great, if not absolutely disreputable, and greatly embarrasses the operations of the Government. They create offices by their own votes and then seek to fill them themselves.
As entrepreneurs, we sometimes do not understand the complexities of running a government.
If you don't donate to Obama and you're a major corporation like Big Oil, then they're gonna blame you for climate change, destroying the planet and they're gonna get everybody turned against you and hating your guts and so forth, and that's how they operate. That's not how Trump operates. That's not how Mike Pence operates. They understand the simple mathematics of economics.
One must realise that it is not a child's play to run a government.
Keeping the people's government open is not a concession to me. Keeping vital service running and hundreds of thousands of Americans on the job is not something you 'give' to the other side.
The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the state governments, in times of peace and security.
When I'm in office I always keep Members of Parliament talking. If they stopped they might start thinking.
I'm impatient not with the House of Commons as an institution, but with the way in which it is operated. This doesn't prove I don't believe in participatory democracy.
Virtually everything that the government does costs more than when the same thing is done in private industry - whether it is building housing, running prisons, collecting garbage, or innumerable other things. Why in the world would we imagine that health care would be the exception?
The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.
When you're in governance, you understand the limitations and the complexities of governance.
Government shutdowns do not actually become what the term implies. Two-thirds of the government cannot shut down. We're only talking about the third of government that's discretionary spending, and even at that, nobody loses their jobs, and nobody loses their Thanksgiving turkey. The whole thing has resulted from the Republican Party thinking they bought the farm back in 1995.
[Peter] Drucker says that modern government can do only two things well: wage war and inflate the currency. Its the aim of my administration to prove Mr Drucker wrong.
So much of politics is about the daily grind of political business: the people to see, the myriad different facets of government, the remorseless agenda of this part of the media or that.
No longer are technology and cyber issues confined to tech geeks in some backroom. In the digital age, IT issues are front and center. They are central to what government does and how it does it.
I was a business man. When they elected me, it took me two years to learn about how government ran.
The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a thing more misleading than enlightening.
You walk into Air Force One. It's like a surreal experience, in a certain way, but you have to get over it, because there's so much work to be done, whether it's jobs or other nations that truly hate us. You have to get over it.
The way that things happen in Egypt, the government - or the head of the government - don't get personally involved. They were always goonies and agents and people who do that kind of work for the government either by direct instructions or because they think that they're doing something good or they want to be on the good side of the government.
Anybody who has watched government from the inside recognizes that governments need institutions, need ways to respond to crises.
Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.
For me, appropriations bills are the glue. These are the bills that must move, no matter what, to keep the government functioning as a reliable element of our society. The Appropriations Committee shouldn't be the most political place to be; it's the place where we have to make the institution function for the country.
And one of the things I've tried to do in my first months in office is to give more Georgians - reporters and members of the general public alike - a closer look at how their government works.
Interdepartmental memoranda, advisory opinions, recommendations of subordinates, informal working papers, material in personnel files, and the like, cannot be subject to disclosure if there is to be any orderly system of government.
Life is a little different from what you would read in the mainstream media inside the White House.
