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"The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests."
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"I never knew a government yet that wanted to do anything."
"Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle."
"Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom."
"I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office."
"The United States Constitution has proved itself the most marvelously elastic compilation of rules of government ever written."
"I don't mind what Congress does, as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."
"A democratic government is the only one in which those who vote for a tax can escape the obligation to pay it."
"I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government."
"I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world."
"A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both."
Explore more quotes by Breyten Breytenbach
"In reality the workings of your governing system are opaque and covert, while hiding in the chattering spotlight of an ostensible transparency, even though the ultimate objective is clear."
"Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War."
"It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal."
"Dangerous because your present Administration and its specialized agencies by all accounts know no restraint in hitting out at any perceived enemy of America, and nobody or nothing can protect one from their vindictiveness."
"The goal, I submit, is obvious: subjugating the world (which is barbarian, dangerous, envious and ungrateful) to US power for the sake of America's interests."
"It would be a tragic mistake for us out here to imagine that Bush represents the hearts and the minds of the majority of your countrymen. Many of your black and other compatriots must be just as anguished as we are."
"The predominant yardstick of your government is not human rights but national interests."
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