Governance Quotes (page 61)
Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence? they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press.? a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning...
Amartya Sen
As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
By the time the think-tank lifers arrived in Baghdad, the crucial roles in the reconstruction had already been outsourced to Halliburton and KPMG. THeir job as the public servants was simply to administer the petty cash, which in Iraq took the form of handling shrink-wrapped bricks of hundred-dollar bills to contractors. It was a graphic glimpse into the acceptable role of government in a corporatist state - to act as a conveyor belt for getting public money into private hands, a job for...
Naomi Klein
During the fifteen minutes that followed, the proud and sensitive girl suffered a shame and pain which she never forgot. To others it might seem a ludicrous or trivial affair, but to her it was a hard experience, for during the twelve years of her life she had been governed by love alone
Louisa May Alcott
A Manhattan lawyer who describes himself as "America`s leading expert on the militia movement" writes that he hugged his three-year-old kid the night of the Oklahoma City bombing. He told junior that it happened "because they hated too much"For now, let`s accept the premise that one hundred sixty-eight humans died in Oklahoma City because people "hated too much"Now answer these questions if you would be so kind: did a federal sniper shoot Vicki Weaver in the face because he hated too much?...
Jim Goad
England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for an instant, that they had no other god to call o? the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are me? who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a...
Gilbert K. Chesterton
Off goes the head of the king, and tyranny gives way to freedom. The change seems abysmal. Then, bit by bit, the face of freedom hardens, and by and by it is the old face of tyranny. Then another cycle, and another. But under the play of all these opposites there is something fundamental and permanent? the basic delusion that men may be governed and yet be free.
H. L. Mencken