Italy has piled up huge public debt because the successive governments were too close to the life of ordinary citizens too willing to please the requests of everybody thereby acting against the interests of future generations.

If governments let themselves be fully bound by the decisions of their parliaments without protecting their own freedom to act a breakup of Europe would be a more probable outcome than deeper integration.

My heart goes out to the brave citizens of Syria who each day risk and even sacrifice their lives to achieve freedom from a murderous regime. We in Israel welcome the historic struggle to forge democratic peace-loving governments in our region.

In South Africa we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world who through the use of non-violent means such as boycotts and divestment encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.

Governments that block the aspirations of their people that steal or are corrupt that oppress and torture or that deny freedom of expression and human rights should bear in mind that they will find it increasingly hard to escape the judgement of their own people or where warranted the reach of international law.

These subsidies from four European governments which include aircraft launch assistance capital injections debt forgiveness have enabled Airbus to develop and range market airliners well below cost.

UNICEF has repeatedly called on governments to ensure basic services for children and this includes providing food where the need exists.

If you go back to the time of J.P. Morgan the world of high finance was completely wholesale. The prestigious investment banks on Wall Street appealed exclusively to large corporations governments and to extremely wealthy individuals.

Fear is the foundation of most governments.

We have convinced over one billion members of the Islamic faith that we are prejudiced against their religion that we would deny them freedom of religion that we want suppress their culture and invade their governments.

Women have a lot to say about how to advance women's rights and governments need to learn from that listen to the movement and respond.

There are more effective ways of tackling environmental problems including global warming proliferation of plastics urban sprawl and the loss of biodiversity than by treaties top-down regulations and other approaches offered by big governments and their dependents.

State governments generate less revenue in a recession. As state leaders struggle to make up for lost revenue legislatures tend to cut funding for higher education. Colleges in turn answer these funding cuts with tuition hikes.

Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments and if need be supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.

Today education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments.

Much can and must be done by governments but they cannot of themselves change lives.

Governments cannot make marriages or turn feckless individuals into responsible citizens. That needs another kind of change agent.

Many people and governments share the mistaken belief that science with new ingenious devices and techniques can rescue us from the troubles we face without our having to mend our ways and change our patterns of activity. This is not so.

I think it true that you know sometimes things start to change even before a government changes and actually I think you can begin to see even the Labour machine beginning to understand that it has become over-reliant on targets and processes that local governments have been over-bossed and bullied.

Excess generally causes reaction and produces a change in the opposite direction whether it be in the seasons or in individuals or in governments.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments the governments alone independent of the interests of the people to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.