Government

Government

Government is broadly defined as the administrative organization with authority to govern a political state. In British English (and that of the Commonwealth of Nations), a government more narrowly refers to the particular administrative bureaucracy in control of a state at a given time—known in American English as an administration. In American English, government refers to the larger system by which any state is organized. Furthermore, government is occasionally used in English as a synonym for governance.

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Famous quotes containing the word government:

    I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons & Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.
    William Blake (1757–1827)

    There are obvious places in which government can narrow the chasm between haves and have-nots. One is the public schools, which have been seen as the great leveler, the authentic melting pot. That, today, is nonsense. In his scathing study of the nation’s public school system entitled “Savage Inequalities,” Jonathan Kozol made manifest the truth: that we have a system that discriminates against the poor in everything from class size to curriculum.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)

    I wish my countrymen to consider that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)