What you do is as important as anything government does. I ask you to seek a common good beyond your comfort; to defend needed reforms against easy attacks; to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor. I ask you to be citizens: citizens, not spectators; citizens, not subjects; responsible citizens, building communities of service and a nation of character.
People forget... that we structured it so that the government, or the people, would be repaid with a really good rate of return. And as it turns out, that aspect of TARP, that's what happened.
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.
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Just look at that Forbes 400. Takes a billion three to get on the Forbes 400 this year. And the aggregate wealth is just staggering. And those people are paying less percentage of their total income to the federal government than their receptionists are. [...] I'll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges - me that the average for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists.
In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all.
Government is merely an attempt to express the conscience of everybody, the average conscience of the nation, in the rules that everybody is commanded to obey. That is all it is.
The trick is figuring out how do we structure government systems that pool resources, and hence facilitate some [wealth] redistribution, because I actually believe in redistribution, at least at a certain level, to make sure that everybody's got a shot.
For my part, I am very much more afraid of the man who does a bad thing and does not know it is bad than of the man who does a bad thing and knows it is bad; because I think that in public affairs stupidity is more dangerous than knavery, because harder to fight and dislodge.