Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which the people have made.
Grover ClevelandRead
Though the people support the government; the government should not support the people.
Interpretation
The government should maintain a distance from dependency on its citizens, promoting self-reliance.
This quote suggests that while citizens may support their government, it is not the government's role to overly intervene or provide for the people's needs. Instead, citizens should strive for independence and self-sufficiency, relying on their own abilities and resources rather than expecting government support.
In practice
In a political debate discussing the role of government in citizens' lives.
Public officers are the servants and agents of the people, to execute the laws which the people have made.
Unswerving loyalty to duty, constant devotion to truth, and a clear conscience will overcome every discouragement and surely lead the way to usefulness and high achievement.
Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
It is the responsibility of the citizens to support their government. It is not the responsibility of the government to support its citizens.
Once the coffers of the federal government are opened to the public, there will be no shutting them again.
The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include the support of the people.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
What, after all, is the public under present conditions? What are the reasons for its eclipse? What hinders it from finding and identifying itself? By what means shall its inchoate and amorphous estate be organized into effective political action relevant to present social needs and opportunities? What has happened to the public in the century and a half since the theory of political democracy was urged with such assurance and hope?
Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.
It is from weakness that people reach for dictators and concentrated government power. Only the strong can be free. And only the productive can be strong.
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
The performance of international institutions will be symptomatic of the domestic political priorities of influential member states. International institutions don't really have a life and a mind of their own.
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