Quotes & Sayings About Government Offices

If private men are obliged to perform the offices of government, to protect the weak and dispense justice, then the government becomes only a hired man, or clerk, to perform menial or indifferent services. — Henry David Thoreau

In government offices which are sensitive to the vehemence and passion of mass sentiment public men have no sure tenure. They are in effect perpetual office seekers, always on trial for their political lives, always required to court their restless constituents. — Walter Lippmann

There can be no complete and permanent reform of the civil service until public opinion emancipates congressmen from all control and influence over government patronage. Legislation is required to establish the reform. No proper legislation is to be expected as long as members of Congress are engaged in procuring offices for their constituents. — Rutherford B. Hayes

There are three qualifications required in those who have to fill the highest offices, - (1) first of all, loyalty to the established constitution; (2) the greatest administrative capacity; (3) virtue and justice of the kind proper to each form of government. — Aristotle.

The Chinese Communist Party has seen fit to protect most property rights because it recognizes that it has a self-interest in doing so. But the party faces no legal constraints other than its own internal political controls if it decides to violate property rights. Many peasants find their land coveted by municipal authorities and developers who want to turn it into commercial real estate, high-density housing, shopping centers, and the like, or else into public infrastructure like roads, dams, or government offices. There are large incentives for developers to work together with corrupt local officials to illegally take land away from peasants or urban homeowners, and such takings have been perhaps the largest single source of social discontent in contemporary China.33 — Francis Fukuyama

Funding for the Special Operations Network comes directly from the government. Most work is centralized, but all of the SpecOps divisions have local representatives to keep a watchful eye on any provincial problems. They are administered by local commanders, who liaise with the national offices for information exchange, guidance and policy decisions. Like any other big government department, it looks good on paper but is an utter shambles. Petty infighting and political agendas, arrogance and sheer bloody-mindedness almost guarantees that the left hand doesn't know what the right is doing. — Jasper Fforde

But I came to the government under circumstances calculated to generate peculiar acrimony. I found all its offices in the possession of a political sect who wished to transform it ultimately into the shape of their darling model the English government." The Republican victory of 1800, Jefferson said, "had blown all their designs, and they found themselves and their fortresses of power and profit put in a moment into the hands of other trustees. Lamentations and invective were all that remained to them." The — Jon Meacham

In the appointments to the great offices of the government, my aim has been to combine geographical situation, and sometimes other considerations, with abilities and fitness of known characters. — George Washington

Once more: there are three offices according to whose directions the highest magistrates are chosen in certain states - guardians of the law, probuli, councilors - of these, the guardians of the law are an aristocratical, the probuli an oligarchical, the council a democratical institution. — Aristotle.

There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny - they should be setting the example of transparency. — Edward Snowden

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. — James K. Polk

As for the scenes we shared in the Piazza Unita that day in 1897, I can hear the music still, but all the rest is phantom. The last passenger liner sailed long ago. The schooners, steamboats and barges have disappeared. No tram has crossed the piazza for years. The Caffe Flora changed its name to Nazionale when the opportunity arose, and is now defunct. The Governor's Palace is now only the Palace of the Prefect and the Lloyd Austriaco headquarters, having metamorphosed into Lloyd Triestino when the Austrians left, are now government offices: wistfully the marble tritons blow their their horns, regretfully Neptune and Mercury linger upon their entablatures. Those silken and epauletted passengers, with all they represented, have vanished from the face of Europe, and I am left all alone listening to the band. — Jan Morris

Governments change, files remain. The paradox remained: in the dossiers of the State the fact that I had risked my neck for it was simultaneously listed forever as treason. When my name was mentioned, the exalted file clerks in the government offices, who sat on their chairs only because I and people like me allowed them to, made a wry face. — Ernst Junger

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. — Ellen Feldman

That law that created the native corporations was the idea of tanik American corporations to undermine tribal integrity." "What do you mean?" Bertie asks. "Everywhere else in the U.S., tribes have their own government, their own land, and their own money." "They have a monopoly on casinos, you mean," Bertie says cautiously. "Whatever it is. Our tribes in Alaska don't have nothing. It's the native corporations who have all the land and the money, and they're the ones making decisions." "But don't you think they're making decisions in the best interests of their shareholders, the native people?" "They're just making money for their shareholders like any other corporation," Mandy says. "And they hire taniks in Anchorage offices to carry out their business. They don't care about whether people up here are taking their dividends and drinking them away. I hate to say it, but I got to agree with Luther. It's a long, slow genocide, all done under the corporations' laws. — Elizaveta Ristrova

The really critical thing isn't who's sitting in he White House, but who is sitting in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating ? - those are the things that determine what happens ... — Howard Zinn

I have been drawn to Milton Friedman's argument for a negative income tax (NIT) that entirely replaces the existing system of income transfers and social services. The quid pro quo would be that the government withdraw altogether from every other form of interference in the organization of social life. Under such a plan the Department of Health and Human Services would become a check-writing office, and the social service agencies, bureaus, and offices scattered throughout government would close down. — Charles Murray

The world is full of interiors that bleach the spirit. Hospitals, police stations, job centres, local government offices and prisons all have their own subtle type of vampire colour scheme and black-hole furnishing, capable by accident or design of wiping away a person's self-esteem and will to resist, like boiled-over soup off a ceramic hob. — Tom Holt

Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the Government in Washington but in the studios of the networks in New York! — Spiro T. Agnew

I've now interviewed a couple hundred researchers in the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and China. I visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where I met brain-injured veterans. I went to the San Francisco offices of Lumosity, the biggest online provider of these cognitive games aimed at improving intelligence. And I met twice with the guy who leads the funding in this area at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA. It's a government intelligence agency, like DARPA for spies. — Dan Hurley

[In government] the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other-that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. — James Madison

The multiplication of public offices, increase of expense beyond income, growth and entailment of a public debt are indications soliciting the employment of the pruning knife. — Thomas Jefferson

The secondary attack was made against The Hague. Its aim was to get a hold upon the Dutch capital, and in particular to capture the Government offices and the Service headquarters. — Kurt Student

County government can be simplified greatly by reorganizing and consolidating some of the offices, making others appointive, and reducing salaries in keeping with the salaries paid by private business for the performance of similar duties. — Arthur Capper

You can have a revolution wherever you like, except in a government office; even were the world to come to an end, you'd have to destroy the universe first and then government offices. — Karel Capek

The United States has adventured upon a great and noble experiment ... of total separation of Church and State ... The offices of the Government are open alike to all. No tithes are levied to support an established Hierarchy, nor is the fallible judgment of man set up as the sure and infallible creed of faith ... Such is the great experiment which we have tried, and ... our system of free government would be imperfect without it. — John Tyler

So what is government? ... Very simply, it is an agency of coercion. Of course, there are other agencies of coercion - such as the Mafia. So to be more precise, government is the agency of coercion that has flags in front of its offices. — Harry Browne

To say that an Orgota government fell means, of course, only that one group of Commensals replaced another group of Commensals in the controlling offices of the Thirty-Three. Some shadows got shorter and some longer, as they say in Karhide. — Ursula K. Le Guin

But having biologists outside the Beltway remained a problem for the adminisration. "They found they couldn't control us," Williams said ... "That sort of thing just drove them up the wall. They were so used to saying 'do this,' and we'll just go away and do it. Never ask questions. The biologists had good connections with the press and national environmental group. "So eventually they said, 'Okay we're going to send you guys out to the hinterlands.'" The Regan administration began to dismantle the Endangered Species Office in D.C. Biologists have been working from regional offices ever since. — Joe Roman

It is perhaps beside the point to remark that bowling alleys and supermarkets have nursery facilities, while schools and colleges and scientific laboratories and government offices do not. — Betty Friedan

[T]he States can best govern our home concerns and the general government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore ... never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold at market. — Thomas Jefferson

The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no ... when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart ... and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape ... or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth - then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth. — Walt Whitman

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real. — Bruce Jackson

Men never fail to dwell on maternity as a disqualification for the possession of many civil and political rights. Suggest the idea of women having a voice in making laws and administering the Government in the halls of legislation, in Congress, or the British Parliament, and men will declaim at once on the disabilities of maternity in a sneering contemptuous way, as if the office of motherhood was undignified and did not comport with the highest public offices in church and state. It is vain that we point them to Queen Victoria, who has carefully reared a large family, while considering and signing ... — Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The government is a very large constructor. They have schools, colleges, hospitals and courts, offices. We are trying to influence the public works department to adopt green buildings. — Jamshyd Godrej

In the north east, there, they have had quite a bit of government offices moving in. It's not a new policy. — John Prescott

Unlike in the Northern states, the only elected officials in Virginia were federal congressmen and state legislators; all the rest were either selected by the legislature or appointed by the governor or the county courts, which were self-perpetuating oligarchies that dominated local government. Thus popular democratic politics in Virginia and elsewhere in the South was severely limited, especially in contrast to the states of the North, where nearly all state and local offices had become elective and the turbulence of politics and the turnover of offices were much greater. — Gordon S. Wood

Lobbyists have more offices in Washington than the President. You see, the President only tells Congress what they should do. Lobbyists tell'em what they will do. — Will Rogers

Colonial governors at their seats of government, and Ministers Plenipotentiary in their ambassadorial residences are very great persons indeed; and when met in society at home, with the stars and ribbons which are common among them now, they are less, indeed, but still something. But at the Colonial and Foreign Offices in London, among the assistant secretaries and clerks, they are hardly more than common men. All the gingerbread is gone there. His Excellency is no more than Jones, and the Representative or Alter Ego of Royalty mildly asks little favours of the junior clerks. — Anthony Trollope

One of my goals upon becoming Secretary of State was to take diplomacy out of capitals, out of government offices, into the media, into the streets of countries. — Hillary Clinton

If democracy is ever to be threatened, it will not be by revolutionary groups burning government offices and occupying the broadcasting and newspaper offices of the world. It will come from disenchantment, cynicism and despair caused by the realisation that the New World Order means we are all to be managed and not represented. — Tony Benn

Conservatives are winning offices, and champions of big government are cleaning out their desks right now. — Rick Perry

I have written to Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, asking him to consider 'staggered office timings' for government offices, which will help in decongesting road traffic during peak hours. — Veerappa Moily

The draconian prohibitions of the Taliban years and the gains Afghan women have achieved since the Taliban government was overthrown in 2001 are now well known and often cited: Today, Afghans lucky enough to live in secure regions can go to school, women may work in offices, and the burqa is no longer mandatory. — Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

All over Europe, all over the world, men were spying. While in
government offices other men were tabulating the results of the spies'
labours; thicknesses of armour-plating, elevation angles of guns,
muzzles velocities, details of fire control mechanisms and
range-finders, fuse efficiencies, details of fortifications, positions
of ammunition stores, disposition of key factories, landmarks for
bombers. The world was getting ready to go to war. For the cannon-makers
and for the spies, business was good. — Eric Ambler

The Book Highlights and Attacks areas of Inefficiency and Hypocrisy in Government Offices. It injects the much-need Enema into its Highly Constipated System. — Mahesh Ubhayakar

Only to bureaucrats can the idea occur that establishing new offices, promulgating new decrees, and increasing the number of government employees alone can be described as positive and beneficial measures. — Ludwig Von Mises

I would rather starve and rot and keep the privilege of speaking the truth as I see it, than of holding all the offices that capital has to give from the presidency down. — Henry Adams

If we resort for a criterion to the different principles on which different forms of government are established, we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure for a limited period, or during good behavior. — James Madison

Love is found when you don't have to give it. It is the emotion of generosity and kindness that is compelled by no one. It is performed on the battlefield, in our daily tasks, in the marketplace, the factories, at school, in the offices, and in the halls and corridors of government ... But only when one truly gives of himself and without compulsion. — James Michael Pratt

In all general questions which become the subjects of discussion, there are always some truths mixed with falsehoods. I confess, there is danger where men are capable of holding two offices. Take mankind in general, they are vicious, their passions may be operated upon. We have been taught to reprobate the danger of influence in the British government, without duly reflecting how far it was necessary to support a good government. We have taken up many ideas upon trust, and at last, pleased with our own opinions, establish them as undoubted truths. — Alexander Hamilton

The natural aristocracy I consider as the most precious gift of nature for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. And indeed it would have been inconsistent in creation to have formed man for the social state, and not to have provided virtue and wisdom enough to manage the concerns of the society. May we not even say that that form of government is the best which provides the most - for a pure selection of these natural aristoi into the offices of government? — Thomas Jefferson

Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices ... — Jefferson Davis

The regular distribution of power into distinct departments; the introduction of legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts composed of judges holding their offices during good behavior; the representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of their own election ... They are means, and powerful means, by which the excellences of republican government may be retained and its imperfections lessened or avoided. — Alexander Hamilton

I go by the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom [to the offices of government]. — James Madison

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons. — Alberto Manguel

Public opinion: May it always perform one of its appropriate offices, by teaching the public functionaries of the State and of the Federal Government, that neither shall assume the exercise of powers entrusted by the Constitution to the other. — James K. Polk

You know, you just know, that after the president goes out there and announces he wants to make community college free for all Americans - as though anything government does is 'free' - or is unilaterally and unconstitutionally legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants, he comes back to the offices, pulls out the presidential BlackBerry, and gleefully follows along as the Right goes completely ape over these wild policy decisions. — John Podhoretz

There were moments of racial unity. Lawrence Goodwyn found in east Texas an unusual coalition of black and white public officials: it had begun during Reconstruction and continued into the Populist period. The state government was in the control of white Democrats, but in Grimes County, blacks won local offices and sent legislators to the state capital. The district clerk was a black man; there were black deputy sheriffs and a black school principal. A night-riding White Man's Union used intimidation and murder to split the coalition, but Goodwyn points to "the long years of interracial cooperation in Grimes County" and wonders about missed opportunities. — Howard Zinn

There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices. — Robert Aickman

Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful. Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges talk you to death, insurance and income tax offices milk money from your wage packets and rob you to death. And if you're still left with a tiny bit of life in your guts after all this boggering about, the army calls you up and you get shot to death. And if you're clever enough to stay out of the army you get bombed to death. Ay, by God, it's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck, though there ain't much you can do about it unless you start making dynamite to blow their four-eyed clocks to bits. — Alan Sillitoe

In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are what they should be - burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring them intense labor and great private loss. — Thomas Jefferson