Quotes & Sayings About Overreaching

The future chief justice of the United States told the delegates that an independent federal judiciary was a necessary bulwark against an overreaching Congress. If Congress were to exceed its powers, said Marshall, it would be the duty of the judiciary to declare the action void. Marshall — James F. Simon

We must guard against the overreaching hand of big government trying to take away our freedom. And we must always protect the environment in a manner consistent with our values. — Steve Forbes

Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter. — Sheryl Sandberg

Americans are overreaching; overreaching is the most admirable and most American of the many American excesses. — George Will

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, intact for over 200 years, guaranteed that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath of affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. After September 11th, 2001, those were just words on an old piece of paper, no longer a restriction of the Government's overreaching power to shake down its subjects. — Kenneth Eade

Human beings are empowered to exercise dominion over nature and even to be participants in creation; and yet, at the same time, there are strictures against idolatry, which is a kind of overreaching and confusing human beings' role with God's. — Michael Sandel

A prince, as I have said before, sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. From these, therefore, he should abstain. For so long as neither their property nor their honour is touched, the mass of mankind live contentedly, and the prince has only to cope with the ambition of a few, which can in many ways and easily be kept within bounds.

A prince is despised when he is seen to be fickle, frivolous, effeminate, pusillanimous, or irresolute, against which defects he ought therefore most carefully to guard, striving so to bear himself that greatness, courage, wisdom, and strength may appear in all his actions. In his private dealings with his subjects his decisions should be irrevocable, and his reputation such that no one would dream of overreaching or cajoling him. — Niccolo Machiavelli

The framers of our Constitution understood the dangers of unbridled government surveillance. They knew that democracy could flourish only in spaces free from government snooping and interference, and they put restraints on government overreaching in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights ... These protections require, at a minimum, a neutral arbiter - a magistrate - standing between the government's endless desire for information and the citizens' desires for privacy. — Elizabeth Holtzman

The EPA has a history of overreaching its authority. — John Barrasso

The truth that writers secretly harbor is that all books are failures. We try to do something that can't be done. Words. Is that all we rely on? Smudgy ink marks on a page? Pallid wisps and blotches? Text as scaffolding trying to hold up worlds? Actually, no, it's not all we rely on. What's worse is our reliance on the reader. A writer is forever locked in an interdependent relationship. It's like building a bridge from opposite sides of a river - our flimsy words and their frail, overreaching imaginations. The bridge will never meet in the middle. It's not possible. Sometimes you haven't even decided on the same river. The Gateway Arch in Saint Louis missed in the middle by a matter of inches the first time around. They tried again and made it. Writers know we never will. — Julianna Baggott

We've got a deeply flawed political system with an insane overreaching extremist element, with a Supreme Court that is completely loony. — Lizz Winstead

That the role of size has been to some degree neglected in biology may lie in its simplicity. Size may be a property that affects all of life, but it seems pallid compared to the matter which makes up life. Yet size is an aspect of the living that plays a remarkable, overreaching role that affects life's matter in all its aspects. — John Tyler Bonner

The question is not whether we should or should not regulate; it
is how much should we regulate and who the regulators should
be. We went overboard on deregulation under Reagan. Under
Bush, many people lost in the casino. Now we have the Obama
administration overreacting and overreaching with regulation that
does the exact opposite of wealth creation. If we are to have change
we can believe in, then we could start by replacing the majority
of the lawyers in regulatory agencies with actual experienced, successful
business veterans. They would have recognized the early warning
signs of many of the financial debacles created by the bubble-bust
cycle. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The greatest assassin of life is haste, the desire to reach things before the right time which means overreaching them. — Juan Ramon Jimenez

My biggest fear is overreaching. I have been in situations where I felt swamped, and it's turned out really well; and I've had other situations where I've had to walk off the film after five minutes because I realized I was in way over my head. — Anne Hathaway

We want an Afghanistan that is shaped by the dreams of the great Afghan people, not by irrational fears and overreaching ambitions of others. — Narendra Modi

The greatest bulwark against an overreaching government, as tyrants know, is a religious population. That is because religious people form communities of interest adverse to government control of their lives; religious communities rely on their families and each other rather than an overarching government utilizing force. — Ben Shapiro

My adult life has been a patchwork of projects, most of which were fleeting fancies of overreaching vision. I tend to seize on things, only to abandon them due to a lack of time, talent or inclination. — Susan Wiggs

Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. — Ron Fournier

Knowledge is not wisdom: cleverness is not, not without awareness of our death, not without recalling just how brief our flare is. He who overreaches will, in his overreaching, lose what he possesses, betray what he has now. That which is beyond us, which is greater than the human, the unattainably great, is for the mad, or for those who listen to the mad, and then believe them. — Euripides

I think Americans are - particularly, independent voters are looking at Washington, and they see too many taxes, too much spending, too much debt, too many Washington takeovers, and they want to provide a check and a balance to what they see as a runaway, overreaching Washington government. — Lamar Alexander

Many is the mirage I chased. Always I was overreaching myself. The oftener I touched reality, the harder I bounced back to the world of illusion, which is the name for everyday life. — Henry Miller

You do not command me. The silence went on and on, painful and breathless, like a singer overreaching to finish a phrase. Then, — Madeline Miller

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be ... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My belief is that we were put into this world of wonders and beauty with a special ability to appreciate them, in some cases to have the fun of taking a hand in developing them, and also in being able to help other people instead of overreaching them and, through it all, to enjoy life - that is, to be happy. — Robert Baden-Powell

The pulpit only "teaches" to be honest; the market-place "trains" to overreaching and fraud; and teaching has not a tithe of the efficiency of training. Christ never wrote a tract, but He went about doing good. — Horace Mann

The outcome document known as "Transforming our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development" highlights poverty eradication as the overreaching goal of the new development agenda and has at its core the integration of the economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development. The emerging development agenda is unique in that it calls for action by all countries, poor, rich and middle-income. The 'five Ps' people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership - capture the broad scope of the agenda. The SDGs are expected to be achieved by 2030. — New Media Wing

I think people who want to use genetic technologies to gain a competitive edge for their children are engaging in a kind of overreaching that could really undermine our appreciation of children as gifts for which we should be grateful and, instead, to view them as products or instruments that are there to be molded and directed. — Michael Sandel

To be sure, all translation is interpretation. ... Be that as it may, functional-equivalence translations, which presume that ambiguity, multivalence, and contradiction are by definition not part of the Bible, take far more creative and interpretive license than formal ones in eradicating those features. In so doing, they too often try to make the Bible into something it's not. — Timothy Beal

'Obamacare,' as it's been called, is far too reaching. It's overreaching. It needs to have a lot of it repealed. — Joe Manchin

With a chip on his shoulder larger than his margin of victory, Barack Obama is approaching his second term by replicating the mistake of his first. Then his overreaching involved health care - expanding the entitlement state at the expense of economic growth. Now he seeks another surge of statism, enlarging the portion of gross domestic product grasped by government and dispensed by politics. The occasion is the misnamed 'fiscal cliff,' the proper name for which is: the Democratic Party's agenda. — George Will

Resisting overreaching by the federal government is appropriate and, yes, even patriotic. — Russ Feingold

We who live under heaven, we of the clovery kindgom, we middlesins people have often watched the sky overreaching the land. — James Joyce

Increased spending, growing government debt and overreaching regulations are stifling job creation and economic growth. — Joe Craft