Citizen And Government Duty Quotes

#1. The recognition of the fact that Congress has no resources of its own forces us to acknowledge that the only way Congress can give one American one dollar is to first, through intimidation, threats, and coercion, confiscate that dollar from some other American. If a private citizen did the same thing that Congress does, we would call it an immoral act - namely theft. Acts such as theft that are immoral when done privately do not become moral when done collectively. The moral tragedy that has befallen Americans is our belief that it is okay for government to forcibly use one American to serve the purposes of another #Quote by Walter E. Williams

#2. Yes, I'm talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness.
A consciousness that is able to understand
how we're all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth,
and to the Earth itself.
And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril.
Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality
because it's painful, it's frightening.
Sometimes, it's terrifying.
It's terrifying to face the truth.
So I ask each of you to search your hearts,
as to what your truth is,
for being a citizen of the Earth,
promoting justice as a foundation for peace.
It's not going to happen magically,
it's not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions.
I think we're going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways
whether our government wants it or not.
Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness,
we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet.
We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price.
And what more glorious goal than peace for all people?
...To build a new society, a society that understands
that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less.
And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks
to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings. #Quote by S. Brian Willson

#3. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen ... #Quote by Zbigniew Brzezinski

#4. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law ... that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#5. I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government - the Kennedy administration at that time - into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen. #Quote by James Meredith

#6. ...small government gives you big freedoms--and Big Government leaves you with very little freedom. The opposite of Big Government is not small government, but Big Liberty. The bailout and the stimulus and the budget and the trillion-dollar deficits are not merely massive transfers from the most dynamic and productive sector to the least dynamic and productive. When governments annex a huge chunk of the economy, they also annex a huge chunk of individual liberty. You fundamentally change the relationship between the citizen and the state into something closer to that of junkie and pusher--and you make it very difficult ever to change back. #Quote by Mark Steyn

#7. One of the gabelle's most irritating inventions was the sel du devoir, the salt duty. Every person in the Grande Gabelle over the age of eight was required to purchase seven kilograms (15.4 pounds) of salt each year at a fixed high government price. This was far more salt than could possibly be used, unless it was for making salt fish, sausages, hams, and other salt-cured goods. But using the sel du devoir to make salted products was illegal, and, if caught, the perpetrator would be charged with the crime of faux saunage, salt fraud, which carried severe penalties. Many simple acts were grounds for a charge of faux saunage. In the Camargue, shepherds who let their flocks drink the salty pond water could be charged with avoiding the gabelle. #Quote by Mark Kurlansky

#8. But of all the things which I have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected. The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution, if the laws are democratical, democratically or oligarchically, if the laws are oligarchical. For there may be a want of self-discipline in states as well as in individuals. Now, to have been educated in the spirit of the constitution is not to perform the actions in which oligarchs or democrats delight, but those by which the existence of an oligarchy or of a democracy is made possible. Whereas among ourselves the sons of the ruling class in an oligarchy live in luxury, but the sons of the poor are hardened by exercise and toil, and hence they are both more inclined and better able to make a revolution. And in democracies of the more extreme type there has arisen a false idea of freedom which is contradictory to the true interests of the state. For two principles are characteristic of democracy, the government of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is just is equal; and that equality is the supremacy of the popular will; and that freedom means the doing what a man likes. In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fan #Quote by Aristotle

#9. If the average citizen thinks God has nothing to do with government, who then creates our rights and what makes them inalienable? #Quote by Glenn Beck

#10. There is a kind of dictatorship that can come about through a creeping paralysis of thought, readiness to accept paternalistic measures by government, and along with those measures comes a surrender of our own responsibilities and therefore a surrender of our own thought over our own lives and our own right to exercise the vote. The free system gives the right to every citizen to do something for himself. Because he has the right, the opportunity is always there. #Quote by Dwight D. Eisenhower

#11. As parents, we can have no joy, knowing that this government is not sufficiently lasting to ensure any thing which we may bequeath to posterity: And by a plain method of argument, as we are running the next generation into debt, we ought to do the work of it, otherwise we use them meanly and pitifully. In order to discover the line of our duty rightly, we should take our children in our hand, and fix our station a few years farther into life; that eminence will present a prospect, which a few present fears and prejudices conceal from our sight. #Quote by Thomas Paine

#12. The teaching of politics is that the Government, which was set for protection and comfort of all good citizens, becomes the principal obstruction and nuisance with which we have to contend ... The cheat and bully and malefactor we meet everywhere is the Government. #Quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. For in a government of laws and not of men, no man, however prominent or powerful, and no mob however unruly or boisterous, is entitled to defy a court of law. If this country should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors. #Quote by John F. Kennedy

#14. Ladies and gentlemen, it is not the job of government to be the national nanny. The average citizen can look after his or her own needs without assistance from somebody who works here in Washington. #Quote by Tom Clancy

#15. The government does not add value to the economy. It removes value from the economy by imposing taxes on one citizen and providing cash to another. #Quote by Mark Levin

#16. When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government #Quote by Thomas Jefferson

#17. Each of you, for himself or herself, by himself or herself, and on his or her own responsibility, must speak. It is a solemn and weighty responsibility and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government or politician. Each must decide for himself or herself alone what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man, to decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor. It is traitorous both against yourself and your country.
Let men label you as they may, if you alone of all the nation decide one way, and that way be the right way by your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country, hold up your head for you have nothing to be ashamed of. #Quote by Mark Twain

#18. The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists, as you can see from the barons' wars. When duty and religion are really destroyed, it will be by the rich. #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#19. The legislation of the government has been directed rather to the protection of the rights of money and property than to the best good of the citizen. #Quote by Susette La Flesche

#20. What the political left, even in democratic countries, share is the notion that knowledgeable and virtuous people like themselves have both a right and a duty to use the power of government to impose their superior knowledge and virtue on others. #Quote by Thomas Sowell

#21. I do not mean to say that this general government is charged with the duty of redressing or preventing all the wrongs in the world; but I do think that it is charged with the duty of preventing and redressing all wrongs which are wrongs to itself. #Quote by Abraham Lincoln

#22. The single most important duty of the federal government is to protect and defend our national sovereignty. There are new and disturbing reports of American nuclear submarines passing though Canadian waters without obtaining the permission of, or even notifying, the Canadian government. #Quote by Stephen Harper

#23. A responsible citizen is the one that sees something wrong in the society, something he is not satisfied with or that he cannot agree with and responds not by blaming the government or leaders. But by designing ways and means of bringing a lasting solution to the issues at hand #Quote by Sunday Adelaja

#24. Folks, the most insidious part of this whole health care scheme is that all of these vast medical expenditures will become nothing more than government budget items. We individuals will no longer exist. The relationship between a government and citizen will change forever. #Quote by Rush Limbaugh

#25. I want to make it clear that I am not implying here that all housing issues can be solved through market solutions. Many cases of homelessness, for instance, particularly in affluent cities, stem from social welfare policies and require and immediate government action. It is important from the beginning to clearly separate emergency social welfare from housing policy. Too often, housing policy is conceived as an extension of social welfare applied to the middle class.
In every large city, a small number of households - some may be one-person households - are unable to pay for their housing. They end up in the streets. These households may be permanently or temporarily disabled - physically or mentally - or may have experienced bad luck that results in long unemployment periods. It is certainly the duty of the government to provide a shelter for them as an emergency service. Once in an emergency shelter, social workers can identify those who are likely to be permanently unable to earn an income and then direct them toward a social housing shelter, where specialized staff will follow up on their case. Other homeless households may need only temporary help to find a job and a house they can afford before they rejoin the city's active population. The provision of homeless shelters is not part of housing policy, as it has little to do with supply and demand. #Quote by Alain Bertaud

#26. Good government is that which delivers the citizen from being done out of his life and property too arbitrarily and violently-one that relieves him sufficiently from the barbaric business of guarding them to enable him to engage in gentler, more dignified, and more agreeable undertakings ... #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#27. Government today is growing too strong to be safe. There are no longer any citizens in the world there are only subjects. They work day in and day out for their masters they are bound to die for their masters at call. Out of this working and dying they tend to get less and less. #Quote by H.L. Mencken

#28. The chief duty of government is to keep the peace and stand out of the sunshine of the people. #Quote by James A. Garfield

#29. If the emperor had capriciously decreed the death of the most eminent and virtuous citizen of the republic, the cruel order would have been executed without hesitation by the ministers of open violence or of specious injustice. The caution, the delay, the difficulty with which he proceeded in the condemnation and punishment of a popular bishop, discovered to the world that the privileges of the church had already revived a sense of order and freedom in the Roman government. #Quote by Edward Gibbon

#30. Despite its potential, the federal government has restricted funding for creating new cell lines - putting the burden of any future research squarely on the shoulders of the private sector. Government's most basic responsibility, however, is the health and welfare of its people, so it has a duty to encourage appropriate scientific investigations that could possibly save the lives of millions. #Quote by Michael Bloomberg

#31. If you give the government the right to determine the consumption of the human body, to determine whether one should smoke or not smoke, drink or not drink, there is no good reply you can give to people who say, More important than the body is the mind and the soul, and man hurts himself much more by reading bad books, by listening to bad music and looking at bad movies. Therefore it is the duty of the government to prevent people from committing those faults. And, as you know, for many hundreds of years governments and authorities velieved that it was their duty. #Quote by Ludwig Von Mises

#32. The function of Government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens. #Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt

#33. Any decision to use lethal force against a United States citizen - even one intent on murdering Americans and who has become an operational leader of al-Qaida in a foreign land - is among the gravest that government leaders can face. #Quote by Eric Holder

#34. Government's first duty and highest obligation is public safety. #Quote by Arnold Schwarzenegger

#35. The same government that requires a taxpaying citizen to document every statement on his tax return decrees that questioning a welfare applicant demeans and humiliates him. #Quote by Ronald Reagan