Public Welfare Quotes & Sayings

The nation relies upon public discussion as one of the indispensable means to attain correct solutions to problems of social welfare. Curtailment of free speech limits this open discussion. Our whole history teaches that adjustment of social relations through reason is possible when free speech is maintained. — Stanley Forman Reed

If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full-flowered self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support. — Keith Olbermann

Higher education isn't just a personal investment. It's a public good that pays off in a more competitive workforce and better-informed and engaged citizens. Every year, we spend nearly $100 billion on corporate welfare, and more than $500 billion on defense spending. Surely ensuring the next generation can compete in the global economy is at least as important as subsidies for big business and military adventures around the globe. In fact, I think we can and must go further - not just making public higher education tuition-free, but reinventing education in America as we know it. — Robert Reich

Calling out the supposed 'abuse' of welfare by blacks and other people of color is a time-honored tactic for distracting the general public from actual national issue. It also taps into latent, subconscious racism, which is what right-wing politicians would call a 'win-win. — Justin Simien

All civil rulers, as such, are the ordinance and ministers of God; and they are all, by the nature of their office, and in their respective spheres and stations, bound to consult the public welfare. — Jonathan Mayhew

Times are tough but they are tough because the government is trying to do the right thing, whether on public service reform, education, health, anti-social behaviour and welfare, or in counter-terrorism — Tony Blair

I have the highest veneration of those Gentleman,
but, Sir, give me leave to demand, what right had they to say, We, the People? My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them to speak the language of, We, the People, instead of We, the States? States are the characteristics, and the soul of the confederation. If the States be not the agents of this compact, it must be one of great consolidated National Government of the people of all the States. — Patrick Henry

If ... a principle of true Religion [i.e., true Christianity] should ... gain ground, there is no estimating the effects on public morals, and the consequent influence on our political welfare. — William Wilberforce

Every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it. — Theodore Roosevelt

True security is based on people's welfare - on a thriving economy, on strong public health and education programmes, and on fundamental respect for our common humanity. Development, peace, disarmament, reconciliation and justice are not separate from security; they help to underpin it. — Ban Ki-moon

America cut back on "welfare" from the 1970s onward. Family income support fell from 0.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to under 0.2 percent in 2010.16 Welfare still looms large in the public's imagination, but it plays little role in the budget and the deficit. It's been a long time since America was generous to its poor families with children! The — Jeffrey D. Sachs

But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It's a given that it's nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don't do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare. — Jerry A. Coyne

If they had won, all they'd have thought about was making more money, the upper class. Abendsen, he's wrong; there would be no social reform, no welfare public works plans - the Anglo-Saxon plutocrats wouldn't have permitted it." Juliana thought, Spoken like a devout Fascist. — Philip K. Dick

Sooner or later we've got to tie the saving of the natural world to our own public welfare. — Jim Fowler

When it comes to animal agriculture, there is conventional, which is really hideous, and "compassionate" or "certified humane" or whatever, which *may* be *slightly* less hideous. But it's all torture. It's all wrong. These "happy" gimmicks are just designed to make the public feel better about exploiting animals. Don't buy the propaganda of "happy" exploitation. Go vegan and promote veganism. — Gary L. Francione

My political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public welfare, leads me to ask who authorized them (the framers of the Constitution) to speak the language of 'We, the People,' instead of 'We, the States'? — Patrick Henry

Free education, almost free healthcare, a generous benefits system and a better state pension than elsewhere, guarantee equal opportunities for all citizens. The only problem is that all these require a considerable amount of public revenue. This is why the common assertion that to be born in Finland is like winning the jackpot in the lottery is only applicable when you are at the receiving end. A far more common experience is that you need to win the lottery just to cover the tax bill. — Tarja Moles

The Tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy
is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy. — Montesquieu

In my public statements I have earnestly urged that there rested upon government many responsibilities which affect the moral andspiritual welfare of our people. The participation of women in elections has produced a keener realization of the importance of these questions and has contributed to higher national ideals. Moreover, it is through them that our national ideals are ingrained in our children. — Herbert Hoover

Do not talk to me of goodness, of abstract justice, of nature law. Necessity is the highest law, public welfare is the highest justice. — Napoleon Bonaparte

The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... the values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled. — William O. Douglas

Must we, under the happy hope of a false tranquility, sacrifice to the people in power the public welfare, and under vain pretence of preserving the peace, abandon the empire to robbers who would plunder it — Claude Adrien Helvetius

A tax can never be favorable to the public welfare, except by the good use that is made of its proceeds. — Jean-Baptiste Say

Those on the left who scream about income gaps choose to focus on the success of those at the top rather than the failures of those at the bottom. They conveniently ignore that liberals are the ones who have pushed the moral relativisim and welfare-state dependence that has destroyed black families over the last 60 years. And it is these same liberals who fight to keep low-income kids in failing public schools and fight efforts to get school choice. — Star Parker

Then, too, the senate has a rule that no point is discussed on the same day it is brought up, but rather it is put off till the next meeting; they do this so that someone who blurts out the first thing that occurs to him will not proceed to think up arguments to defend his position instead of looking for what is of use to the commonwealth, being willing to damage the public welfare rather than his own reputation, ashamed, as it were, in a perverse and wrong-headed way, to admit that his first view was short-sighted. From the start such a person should have taken care to speak with deliberation rather than haste. — Thomas More

South Vietnam had to be built from scratch and, from the very beginning, depended far too much on the Western superpowers. As in the case of a person on public welfare, this dependency, which became greater with each day, was quite difficult to shake. — Nguyen Cao Ky

In the meantime, powerful industries and business investors spend considerable sums of money in secretive lobbying; persuading, cajoling and needling politicians to pursue policies that are, in effect, corporate welfare programmes. Corporations and banks receive huge public subsidies and bailouts, while the rest of us are largely left to the cold biting winds of 'market' economics. It's socialism for the rich, and capitalism for the rest of us. — David Cromwell

A person or a ruler who executes his plans (of public welfare) after due consideration, the prosperity stands with him for a longer period. — Chanakya

Borrow a child and get on welfare.
Borrow a child and stay in the house all day with the child,
or go to the public park with the child, and take the child
to the welfare office and cry and say your man left you and
be humble and wear your dress and your smile, and don't talk
back ... — Susan Griffin

The low-wage business model has essentially turned public aid into a form of corporate welfare. The best corrective is to raise the federal minimum wage. A new bill introduced on Thursday by congressional Democrats would lift the minimum from its current level of $7.25 an hour to $12 an hour by 2020. At that level, there would still be a need for public aid to ensure that some working families are kept out of poverty. — Anonymous

Let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he is public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. — Benjamin Rush

Child welfare ought really to cover all sorts of topics, such as better water and sanitation and good roads, and clean streets and public parks and playgrounds. — Marjory Stoneman Douglas

We collaborate with other countries on issues like public health and climate change because we understand these issues affect our collective welfare. — Wendy Kopp

The citizens of America have too much discernment to be argued into anarchy. And I am much mistaken, if experience has not wrought a deep and solemn conviction in the public mind, that greater energy of government is essential to the welfare and prosperity of the community — Alexander Hamilton

What is required from members of Congress and the public alike is a new spirit of devotion to the national welfare beyond party or self-interest. — Evan Bayh

An individual, in promoting his own interest, may injure the public interest; a nation, in promoting the general welfare, may check the interest of a part of its members. — Friedrich List

For the purposes of this paper and discussion, I will equate public service with 'public interest' and 'public welfare', which seem to me to be virtually synonymous (Nockels, 1930). — Anonymous

The police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence. — Robert Peel

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion.
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.
They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead. — Henry A. Wallace

WE DEMOCRATS are deeply flawed people, but we do stick to our guns, and believe in decency and public spiritedness and have refused to hitch our wagon to yahooism and intolerance and have supported government as a necessary force for good to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty . . . — Garrison Keillor

The ninety-nine cent price of a fast-food hamburger simply doesn't take account of that meal's true cost
to soil, oil, public health, the public purse, etc., costs which are never charged directly to the consumer but, indirectly and invisibly, to the taxpayer (in the form of subsidies), the health care system (in the form of food-borne illnesses and obesity), and the environment (in the form of pollution), not to mention the welfare of the workers in the feedlot and the slaughterhouse and the welfare of the animals themselves. — Michael Pollan

The usage of the words "public" and "public sphere" betrays a multiplicity of concurrent meanings. Their origins go back to various historical phases and, when applied synchronically to the conditions of a bourgeois society that is industrially advanced and constituted as a social-welfare state, they fuse into a clouded amalgam. Yet the very conditions that make the inherited language seem inappropriate appear to require these words, however confused their employment. — Jurgen Habermas

In his 1907 retirement address, Joseph Pulitzer urged his successors to always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty. — Joseph Pulitzer

The Superfund legislation set up a system of insurance premiums collected from the chemical industry to clean up toxic wastes. This new program may prove to be as far-reaching and important as any accomplishment of my administration. The reduction of the threat to America's health and safety from thousands of toxic-waste sites will continue to be an urgent but bitterly fought issue-another example for the conflict between the public welfare and the profits of a few private despoilers of our nation's environment. — Jimmy Carter

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale. — Angus King

The parliament no longer is an 'assembly of wise men chosen as individual personalities by privileged strata, who sought to convince each other through arguments in public discussion on the assumption that the subsequent decision reached by the majority would be what was true and right for the national welfare.' Instead it has become the 'public rostrum on which, before the entire nation (which through radio an television participates in a specific fashion in this sphere of publicity), the government and the parties carrying it present and justify to the nation their political program, while the opposition attacks this program with the same opennes and develops its alternatives. — Jurgen Habermas

What do intellectuals and opinion makers get from big government? An increasing number of cushy jobs in the bureaucracy, or in the government-subsidized sector, staffing the welfare regulatory state, and apologizing for its policies, as well as propagandizing for them among the public. To put it bluntly, intellectuals, theorists, pundits, media elites, etc. get to live a life which they could not attain on the free market, but which they can gain at taxpayer expense. — Murray Rothbard

The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state. — George Gilder

The total impact of the Tory/Liberal tax, welfare and public spending changes has hit the poorest 10% in society disproportionately hard - and women have been affected even more badly than men. — Nicola Sturgeon

It has been the one song of those who thirst after absolute power that the interest of the state requires that its affairs should be conducted in secret ... But the more such arguments disguise themselves under the mask of public welfare, the more oppressive is the slavery to which they will lead ... Better that right counsels be known to enemies than that the evil secrets of tyrants should be concealed from the citizens. They who can treat secretly of the affairs of a nation have it absolutely under their authority; and as they plot against the enemy in time of war, so do they against the citizens in time of peace. — Will Durant

The Constitution is not a panacea for every blot upon the public welfare. Nor should this Court, ordained as a judicial body, be thought of as a general haven for reform movements. — John Marshall Harlan

The collection of taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. — Calvin Coolidge

Working people of this country want economic security. The worst possible thing you can do for those families is bust the public finances, have some welfare system this country can't afford. — George Osborne

We must recognize that personal freedoms diminish as the welfare state grows. The price of more and more public programs is less and less private freedom. — Caspar Weinberger

All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and his propagation of the species is his natural right, which none can justly deprive him of; but all property superfluous to such purposes is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition. He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. — Benjamin Franklin

I have only to go stubbornly on towards my aim, and I shall attain my end", thought Levin; "and it's something to work and take trouble for. This is not a matter of myself individually; the question of the public welfare comes into it. The whole system of culture, the chief element in the condition of people, must be completely transformed. Instead of poverty, general prosperity and content; instead of hostility, harmony and unity of interests. In short, a bloodless revolution, but a revolution of the greatest magnitude, beginning in the little circle of our district, then the province, then Russia, then the whole world. Because a just idea cannot but be fruitful. Yes, it's an aim worth working for. — Leo Tolstoy

The nation state has taken the place of God. Responsibilities for education, healing and public welfare which had formerly rested with the Church devolved more and more upon the nation state ... National governments are widely assumed to be responsible for and capable of providing those things which former generations thought only God could provide - freedom from fear, hunger, disease and want - in a word: "happiness". — Lesslie Newbigin

I must say that I have seen Americans make great and real sacrifices to the public welfare; and have noticed a hundred instances in which they hardly ever failed to lend faithful support to one another. — Alexis De Tocqueville

There's a long history of subsidized philanthropy - particularly in the USA - and again the public has come to expect corporations to play a role in their social welfare. It's become easy for some companies to profit from citizen goodwill and volunteerism. — Ravida Din

The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government's assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors' needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior. — Doug Bandow

Remember, government is not an enlightened organization designed to promote public welfare. It is barbaric, uncivilized forcemilitary and police power put to the service of the insiders who control it. Yes, there are constraints on the way the insiders use their power. There are 'checks and balances,' built into the constitution, for example. And there are cultural norms and traditional prohibitions. But eventually, the norms and traditions wear off, like painkillers. And then, the pain of raw government begins again. — Bill Bonner

It was concern for the welfare of children that got me into public service in the first place. — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Any demanding high technology tends to develop influential and dedicated constituencies of those who link its commercial success with both the public welfare and their own. Such sincerely held beliefs, peer pressures, and the harsh demands that the work itself places on time and energy all tend to discourage such people from acquiring a similarly thorough knowledge of alternative policies and the need to discuss them. — Amory Lovins

No matter what happens in public - no matter what - don't doubt that I love you and care about your welfare ... as much as I am able. — Charlaine Harris

What's interesting is that most free-marketers don't seem to want a free market at all, but a status quo market. The market in the United States is anything but free. If it were, big business would have to survive without corporate welfare to the tune of about $1 trillion (that's trillion) in government subsidies, the majority of which, about $650 billion, go to the fossil fuel industry! They are living off of the public dole on subsidies totaling billions of dollar - that we hand out either directly, or through tax breaks for their big corporations - with the false assumption that they are creating jobs. They are not. They are creating yachts, Leer Jets, and McMansions with swimming pools. — Steve Bivans

These men [medical doctors] plan ways of doubling their incomes and come to the public with the plea that they are sincerely interested in the health and welfare of our children and that they put over their income-increasing programs for the health of our babies and for the welfare of the school children. They are as cold-blooded as any class of criminals on the whole earth. Indeed, I know of no other class of criminals who live by crippling, maiming and killing babies and children. — Herbert M. Shelton

Do not calculate what I have done, for I shall accept no recompense. Calculate the public advantage, the welfare and liberty of my country, and believe that I shall refuse no burden, no danger, provided that, at the hour of tranquillity, I may return to private life, for there now remains but one step for my ambition - that of arriving at zero. — Marquis De Lafayette

The public welfare demands that constitutional cases must be decided according to the terms of the Constitution itself, and not according to judges views of fairness, reasonableness, or justice. I have no fear of constitutional amendments properly adopted, but I do fear the rewriting of the Constitution by judges under the guise of interpretation. — Hugo Black

The crime of ingratitude has not yet stained, and I trust never will stain, our national character. You are considered by them as not only having rendered important service in our own revolution, but as being, on a more extended scale, the friend of human rights, and able advocate of public liberty. To the welfare of Thomas Paine, the Americas are not, nor can they be, indifferent. — James Monroe

the usual looters' slogan of 'public welfare, — Ayn Rand

People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind's problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers' dollars at them. — Ronald Reagan

American critics of welfare statism are often surprised to learn that countries like West Germany, with a much more comprehensive welfare state and a statistically larger public sector, have fewer government employees per capita than the United States does. — Robert Kuttner

I now believe that people are bustards with no ethics. It would be better for them to admit it and build their communal life on that admission. The new ethical issue becomes how to maintain public welfare and human happiness in a society of bustards and scum — Naguib Mahfouz

Today government touches everything in America and harms almost everything it touches. Federal, state, and local governments together spend 42 out of every 100 dollars we earn. Those who do the taxing and spending have long since ceased to work for the people as a whole. Rather, they work for themselves and for their clients-the education industry, the welfare culture, public-employee unions, etc.. — Malcolm Wallop

When we give a subsidy, the benefits to the public ought to exceed the benefits to the company. When it doesn't, that's our definition of corporate welfare. — John Kasich

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the people discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the canidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy
to be followed by a dictatorship. — Alexander Fraser Tytler

Tariffs, government contracts, naval and military spending, nationalized industries, tax policy, social welfare, the legal privileging of labor unions were among the means at the disposal of the governing class to exploit the public at large for the benefits of its various clienteles. — Ralph Raico

The United States, with the greatest ability and the weakest desire to finance a welfare state, winds up in the middle of the pack in terms of the absolute value of the resources devoted to it. By 2003 ... America's per capita Public Expenditures were greater than those in Japan, Spain, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, while lower than those in Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Denmark and Sweden. — William Voegeli

Mexico urgently needs a series of structural reforms that will detonate its true economic potential for once and generate more public welfare. — Enrique Pena Nieto

Attractive labels are usually attached to the most dangerous programs, often in the name of public welfare and personal security. — Ezra Taft Benson

Visiting America in the early nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville observd that 'the sects that exist in the United States are innumerable,' and yet 'all sects preach the same moral law in the name of God.' Tocqueville termed religion the first of America's political institutions, which means that it had a profoundly public effect in regulating morality and mores throughout the society. And he saw Christianity as countering the powerful human instincts of selfishness and ambition by holding out an ideal of charity and devotion to the welfare of others. — Dinesh D'Souza

Private sincerity is a public welfare. — C. A. Bartol

A final irony has to do with the idea of political responsibility. Christians are urged to vote and become involved in politics as an expression of their civic duty and public responsibility. This is a credible argument and good advice up to a point. Yet in our day, given the size of the state and the expectations that people place on it to solve so many problems, politics can also be a way of saying, in effect, that the problems should be solved by others besides myself and by institutions other than the church. It is, after all, much easier to vote for a politician who champions child welfare than to adopt a baby born in poverty, to vote for a referendum that would expand health care benefits for seniors than to care for an elderly and infirmed parent, and to rally for racial harmony than to get to know someone of a different race than yours. True responsibility invariably costs. Political participation, then, can and often does amount to an avoidance of responsibility. — James Davison Hunter

Hitherto my observations have only aimed at a vindication of the provision in question, on the ground of theoretic propriety ... But there remains to be mentioned a positive advantage ... I allude to the circumstance of uniformity in the time of elections for the House of Representatives. It is more than possible, that this uniformity may be found by experience to be of great importance to the public welfare; both as a security against the perpetuation of the same spirit in the body; and as a cure for the diseases of faction. — Alexander Hamilton

It is a general popular error to imagine the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare. — Edmund Burke

If you have a really good ideas, one thing you dont need is a fucking gun. An iPad is a kind of a cool thing. They don't need to threaten you with fines to get you to buy one do they? The moment the government says they're gonna force you to do something, you know its a bad idea. If someone invites you on a date with chloroform, an old sofa, and a windowless van, it's not a date.
So, the fact that ObamaCare, welfare state, military industrial complex, public schools - you name it. The fact that it has to be imposed at gunpoint is a clue that it's shit. Recognize that when there is a gun to your face, there is not a very advantageous human being on the other end. — Stefan Molyneux

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig ... The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. — Felix Frankfurter

Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding
and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Free enterprise, [is] a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich. — Noam Chomsky

It is not necessary for the politician to be the slave of the public's group prejudices, if he can learn how to mold the mind of the voters in conformity with his own ideas of public welfare and public service. The important thing for the statesman of our age is not so much to know how to please the public, but to know how to sway the public. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. — Edward Bernays

I believe in active citizenship, for men and women equally, as a simple matter of right and justice. I believe we will have better government in all of our countries when men and women discuss public issues together and make their decisions on the basis of their different areas of experience and their common concern for the welfare of their families and their world. — Eleanor Roosevelt

We believe that only government has the capacity
not to mention the political and moral responsibility
to promote the general welfare.
Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity? — Janet Poppendieck

Our immigration policy is focussed in four areas: First, strengthening border control; second, protecting American jobs by enforcing laws against illegal immigrants at the workplace; third, deporting criminal and deportable aliens; fourth, giving assistance to states who need it, and denying illegal aliens benefits for public services or welfare. — William J. Clinton

All Americans, not only in the states most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants; the public services they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. — William J. Clinton

Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the "free market," then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we'll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let's hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public's rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can. — Cory Doctorow

The great hospitals, houses of confinement, establishments of religion and public order, of assistance and punishment, of governmental charity and welfare measures, are a phenomenon of the classical period: — Michel Foucault

I am for doing good to the poor, but ... I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. I observed ... that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer. — Benjamin Franklin

Climate change will impact most heavily on the disadvantaged. If we don't address these impacts, as well as growing income inequalities, we are marching blindly toward major breakdowns in security, governance, and public welfare. — Wesley K. Wark

What is supposed to happen in a democracy is that each sovereign citizen will always vote in the public interest for the safety and welfare of all. But what does happen is that he votes his own self-interest as he sees it ... which for the majority translates as 'Bread and Circuses'. — Robert A. Heinlein

As long as there are human rights to be defended; as long as there are great interests to be guarded; as long as the welfare of nations is a matter for discussion, so long will public speaking have its place. — William Jennings Bryan