A Quote by Malcolm Gladwell

In the government's eyes, the Branch Davidians were a threat.

Malcolm Gladwell

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Branch Eyes Government Threat Were

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Malcolm Gladwell
Canadian - Author
Born: September 3, 1963

It is useful to compare the Branch Davidians with the Mormons of the mid-nineteenth century. The Mormons were vilified in those years in large part because Joseph Smith believed in polygamy.

Malcolm Gladwell

Some of the worst abuses of government force in recent years were precipitated by technical and victimless gun-law violations. For example, the BATF claimed that the Branch Davidians possessed machine guns without paying the required federal tax and filling in the proper registration forms. So a tax case worth less than $10,000 led to a 76-man helicopter, machine gun, and grenade assault on a home in which 2/3 of the occupants were women and children.

Dave Kopel

I think the Founding Fathers probably knew what they were doing in setting up the government to have a healthy tension between the executive branch and the legislative branch.

Gina Raimondo

As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt learned when he tried to pack the Supreme Court, the three branches of government are coequal for a reason. Neither the executive branch or the legislative branch should use the third branch to a pursue a partisan agenda.

Daniel Pfeiffer

Congress is a co-equal branch of government, with a long and rich history of standing up to the executive branch.

Charlie Sykes

The threat to change Senate rules is a raw abuse of power and will destroy the very checks and balances our founding fathers put in place to prevent absolute power by any one branch of government.

Harry Reid

I was initially just fascinated by the Branch Davidians. This doesn't really apply to Rachel Koresh because she was born into the church, and that was all she had ever known, but I was fascinated by the psychology of how people get to that place - a place like Mount Carmel and an FBI stand-off for 51 days.

Melissa Benoist

The founders had a strong distrust for centralized power in a federal government. So they created a government with checks and balances. This was to prevent any branch of the government from becoming too powerful.

Ezra Taft Benson

The threat of gold redeemability imposes a constant check and limit on inflationary issues of government paper. If the government can remove the threat, it can expand and inflate without cease. And so it begins to emit propaganda, trying to persuade the public not to use gold coins in their daily lives.

Murray Rothbard

The U.K. courts were very clear that Abu Qatada posed a threat to our national security - that's why we were pleased as a government to be able to remove him from the United Kingdom.

Theresa May

People assume that the executive branch has more power than it actually has. Only the legislative branch can create the laws; the executive branch cannot create the laws. So, if the executive branch tries to create a branch one side or the other... you go back to the founders of the nation. They set up a system that ensures that it doesn't happen.

Michael Dell

We have throughout our history been tested when it comes to the institutions of our democracy. And thank God our forefathers were smart enough to establish a government of checks and balances to make sure that power cannot be centralized in any one branch of government. And those institutions have proven themselves.

Leon Panetta

As a member of Congress, a coequal branch of government designed by our founders to provide checks and balances on the executive branch, I believe that lawmakers must fulfill our oversight duty as well as keep the American people informed of the current danger.

Will Hurd

[States and the Federal government are] coordinate departments of one simple and integral whole... The one is the domestic, the other the foreign branch of the same government.

Thomas Jefferson

One faction of one party, in one house of Congress, in one branch of government, doesn't get to shut down the entire government just to refight the results of an election.

Barack Obama

When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, 'If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!' And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch.

Neil Peart

A Quote by Malcolm Gladwell

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