These oversight quotes will inspire you. Oversight is an unintentional failure to notice or do something or the action of overseeing something.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging oversight quotes, oversight sayings, and oversight proverbs.
Best Oversight Quotes
- “As I see it, only God can be all-powerful without danger, because his wisdom and justice are always equal to his power. Thus there is no authority on earth so inherently worthy of respect, or invested with a right so sacred, that I would want to let it act without oversight or rule without impediment (p. 290).” ~ Alexis de Tocqueville
- “An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. Self-government is not possible unless the citizens are educated sufficiently to enable them to exercise oversight. It is therefore imperative that the nation see to it that a suitable education be provided for all its citizens.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
- “I believe that successfully addressing our national security needs while protecting our basic freedoms and civil liberties requires continual Congressional oversight, and I will continue to work to assert the role of this body in carrying out this grave responsibility.” ~ Patrick J. Kennedy
-
“I’ve always been fond of the saying that when it comes to oversight and reform, the federal government does two things well: nothing and overreact.” ~ Darrell Issa
- “In the absence of sound oversight, responsible businesses are forced to compete against unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restrictions on activities that might harm the environment, or take advantage of middle-class families, or threaten to bring down the entire financial system.” ~ Barack Obama
- “It is high time for some congressional oversight backbone.” ~ Bob Barr
- “Uncontrolled access to data, with no audit trail of activity and no oversight would be going too far. This applies to both commercial and government use of data about people.” ~ John Poindexter
-
“Eventually the consumer will come to appreciate the editorial point of view of every different brand. User-generated content without editorial oversight will simply be background noise.” ~ Michael Eisner
- “Hopefully, at some point, people will at least credit the Republicans with carrying out their oversight responsibilities and with pursuing a principled course of action even in the face of everyone’s short-attention spans.” ~ Barbara Olson
- “When governments become large, voters cannot exercise close oversight, otherwise known as political power.” ~ Maggie Gallagher
- “It is one of the most culpable oversights of nature that virtue and beauty so often come in separate packages.” ~ Will Durant
-
“And I have been campaigning for the past three months trying to get the Senate Judiciary Committee that has the oversight authority and responsibility to start its own public hearings.” ~ Sibel Edmonds
- “We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not nor will we ever monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.” ~ Janet Napolitano
- “Anyplace market forces have been artificially removed by the government there is a total absence of incentives, competition, effective oversight, cost controls and so on.” ~ Ann Coulter
- “For the past three years, the Senate intelligence committee has avoided carrying out its oversight of our nation’s intelligence programs whenever the White House becomes uncomfortable with the questions being asked. The very independence of this committee is called into question.” ~ Jay Rockefeller
-
“The clerical system of church management is exceedingly popular, but the whole thought is foreign to Scripture.” ~ Watchman Nee
- “I think it’s something that the citizenry needs to be vigilant about – participating in democracy, and that includes issues like what’s going on and how much secrecy and transparency there should be. That’s an on-going thing – in a democracy you want checks and balances and oversight, but you need a covert agency to protect the country. It’s a very tricky balance and I think it changes as the world changes and I think we all need to be mindful of that.” ~ Matt Damon
- “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “Myth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the “morality” that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the “reason” in culture that reason knows not of.” ~ Kenny Smith
- “The reality is if we sit back and allow a few officials behind closed doors to launch offensive attacks without any oversight against foreign nations, against people we don’t like, against political groups, radicals, and extremists whose ideas we may not agree with, and could be repulsive or even violent – if we let that happen without public buy-in, we won’t have any seat at the table of government to decide whether or not it’s appropriate for these officials to drag us into some kind of war activity that we don’t want, but we weren’t aware of at the time.” ~ Edward Snowden
-
“The mole rat is the only rodent born without a fur coat. With a good lawyer, someone would pay for that little oversight.” ~ Erma Bombeck
- “‘The Committee has identified eight senior leaders who were in a position to prevent or to stop the IRS’s targeting of conservative applicants,’ the Oversight report states. ‘Each of these leaders could have and should have done more to prevent the IRS’s targeting of conservative tax-exempt applicants.'” ~ Patrick Howley
- “Food safety oversight is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two agencies, the FDA and the USDA. The USDA mostly oversees meat and poultry; the FDA mostly handles everything else, including pet food and animal feed. Although this division of responsibility means that the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food supply, it only gets 20% of the federal budget for this purpose. In contrast, the USDA gets 80% of the budget for 20% of the foods. This uneven distribution is the result of a little history and a lot of politics.” ~ Marion Nestle
- “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.” ~ Wendell Phillips
- “Congress is supposed to provide oversight, the voters are supposed to provide oversight. And you [the media] were supposed to provide oversight. That’s why you have special liberties and that’s why you have special protections.” ~ Trey Gowdy
-
“I’m increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish.” ~ Elon Musk
- “Cliff Stearns talks about what he did to Planned Parenthood, making Solyndra a household name – why didn’t he do this sooner? Why didn’t he see it coming? It’s the oversight committee, not the hindsight committee.” ~ Ted Yoho
- “And in an issue with this kind of concern to a committee that bears the oversight responsibility, I think you can see that we’re very dismayed about it .” ~ Dianne Feinstein
- “Law-abiding Americans deserve to know that their government will not secretly tap their phones, read their medical records, access their library accounts or otherwise invade their personal lives, with no oversight or accountability. Law-abiding Americans also deserve to know that when law enforcement can show an impartial judge clear evidence of criminal activity or a threat to national security, swift and decisive action will be taken to protect the public. That is the balance we must achieve.” ~ Ralph Neas
- “To all those broken or hopeless, I have learned this: Be grateful for every single person who was part of your story. The ones that hurt you. The ones that helped you. The ones that came, and the ones that left. They all taught you. Don’t think for a moment that any of it was random. There are no oversights with God. Only perfectly crafted chapters in each unique journey.” ~ Yasmin Mogahed
-
“Given the large size of the illegal harvest, … I find it difficult to understand how this could have been a casual oversight.” ~ Peter DeFazio
- “I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs. My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards. But my assessment, and my team’s assessment was that they help us prevent terrorist attacks. In the abstract, you can complain about ‘Big Brother’ and how this is a potential program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then, I think we’ve struck the right balance.” ~ Barack Obama
- “The methods that will most effectively minimize the ability of intruders to compromise information security are comprehensive user training and education. Enacting policies and procedures simply won’t suffice. Even with oversight the policies and procedures may not be effective: my access to Motorola, Nokia, ATT, Sun depended upon the willingness of people to bypass policies and procedures that were in place for years before I compromised them successfully.” ~ Kevin Mitnick
- “On the Glass-Steagall thing, like I said, if you could demonstrate to me that it was a mistake, I’d be glad to look at the evidence. But I can’t blame [the Republicans]. This wasn’t something they forced me into. I really believed that given the level of oversight of banks and their ability to have more patient capital, if you made it possible for [banks] to go into the investment banking business as continental European investment banks could always do, that it might give us a more stable source of long-term investment.” ~ William J. Clinton
- “It’s disingenuous and wrong to say that the attorney general’s expanded powers in the Patriot Act come with adequate oversight by the courts, … In reality, the most troubling provisions in the law make judges little more than rubber stamps in Justice Department investigations.” ~ Anthony Romero
-
“He constructed a vast labyrinthine of periods, made impassable by the piling-up of clauses upon clauses-clauses in which oversight and bad grammar seemed manifestations of disdain.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
- “We must not falsely teach American history in our schools. We have a law requiring state textbook oversight to guard against frauds like Zinn, and it was encouraging to find that no Hoosier school district had inflicted his book on its students.” ~ Mitch Daniels
- “Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.” ~ Ron Wyden
- “There is no doubt that the reason for my awful oversight was over-confidence that sapped my sense of danger. So that is where to look for the cause of bad blunders – in the exulting feeling of self-congratulation.” ~ Alexander Kotov
- “The most devastating indictment of the president’s proposal is that it threatens to destroy virtually everything about American health care that’s worth preserving. Under the plan’s layers of regulation and oversight, even seeing a doctor whenever you like will be no easy matter: access to physicians will be carefully regulated by gatekeepers; referrals to specialists will be strongly discouraged; second opinions will be almost unheard of; and the availability of new drugs will be limited.” ~ William Kristol
-
“Kingdom Authority is the God-given mandate of Christians to exercise control over the world in the name of Jesus and under His oversight.” ~ Adrian Rogers
- “It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.” ~ John Walford
- “An immigration violation should not give the government license to rip up the rule book. By restricting judicial oversight and blocking public scrutiny, the government has exercised virtually unchecked power over those it has detained.” ~ Jamie Fellner
- “The Daily Caller has obtained an advance copy of a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report set to be released Tuesday morning that definitively proves malicious intent by the IRS to improperly block conservative groups that an IRS adviser deemed ‘icky.'” ~ Patrick Howley
- “I do think it’s true that a huge amount of the oversight that the White House engages in with respect to the Executive Branch is out of fear that somebody’s going to do something crazy and drive the president off a cliff.” ~ Donald Verrilli Jr.
-
“If you have the choice, it’s far better to say, “That person has the job, and they really don’t need that much of my oversight.” Maybe they don’t need any of it.” ~ Jamie Dimon
- “For things that worth little or nothing we care a lot; and we oversight what is necessary; because every man goes towards the exterior; and if he doesn’t regain consciousness quickly, with pleasure remain involved in it.” ~ Thomas a Kempis
- “And if you’re going to be a leader, you know what I ask myself? Would I want to work for you in this job? Would I let my children work for you? Would I give you this job if I wasn’t there to provide oversight? If you went to run another company, would I, as an investor, invest in that company?” ~ Jamie Dimon
- “It’s a new day at the Department of Interior, and we need to examine what makes the most sense for the American people. These are American resources and American treasures, and we need to make sure we’re providing the right kind of protection, oversight and stewardship of these resources for the American people.” ~ Ken Salazar
- “The inside of the Pentagon is an incredible place and a dramatic set. We do [travel] outside, but the inside workings of the civilian oversight of the military inside the Pentagon is really about as exciting as anything you ever want to deal with. It is really amazing.” ~ Dennis Hopper
-
“They’re on you day and night. Their oversight is just too extreme [. . .] That’s why our 10-year loan, we paid it back in three years. We couldn’t stand the government. The bureaucracy kills you.” ~ Lee Iacocca
- “Our success has come from the lack of oversight we’ve provided, and our success will continue to be from a lack of oversight. But if you’re going to provide minimal oversight, you have to buy carefully. It’s a different model from GE’s. GE’s works – it’s just very different from ours.” ~ Charlie Munger
- “I want to emphasis again, Governor (Thomas) Kean and Congressman (Lee) Hamilton pointed out that congressional oversight also was a major contributor to our failures prior to 9/11 and that has to be fixed as well.” ~ John McCain
- “The financial collapse of 2008 got its start with predatory mortgages, that weren’t sold by community banks and credit unions, they were sold by fly by night mortgage brokers who had almost zero federal oversight and then the big banks looked over, saw the profit potential and they wanted it bad. So they jumped in and sold millions of these terrible mortgages while the bank regulators just looked the other way.” ~ Elizabeth Warren
- “We live in a new time and a new place, and people have to begin to be ready for the kind of oversight that the public is demanding.” ~ Ras Baraka
-
“I saw in the Nineties that we were increasing police power with get tough policies and 3 strikes laws, but without additional oversights.” ~ Van Jones
- “The global financial crisis is a great opportunity to showcase and propagate both causal and moral institutional analysis. The crisis shows major flaws in the way the US financial system is regulated and, more importantly, in our political system, which is essentially a bazaar of legalized bribery where financial institutions can buy themselves the governmental regulations they want, along with the regulators who routinely receive lucrative jobs in the industry whose oversight had formerly been their responsibility, the so-called revolving-door practice.” ~ Thomas Pogge
- “The next four years, though, you still have to abide by the oversight process that is there to prevent this kind of bizarre sort of cult-like atmosphere that falls along. I mean, I accept that kind of veil of secrecy around Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, but I don’t accept that around our government.” ~ Jon Stewart
- “I think there’s always a role for Congress under every instance in every administration to conduct oversight of the executive branch.” ~ Paul Ryan
- “We need to do a lot of restructuring of the existing ports, particularly Durban. The separation of oversight and regulation from operations in the port, the possibility of bringing in private investors, to put in new investment to build capacity in the port. So, the restructuring of the ports will take place like that.” ~ Thabo Mbeki
-
“It felt like an oversight to me, something that needed to be corrected. They [women who hid Jewish children] deserved to be understood and remembered.” ~ Megan Chance
- “Many of our ally states don’t have these constitutional protections – in the UK, in New Zealand, in Australia. They’ve lost the right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause. All of those countries, in the wake of these surveillance revelations, rushed through laws that were basically ghostwritten by the National Security Agency to enable mass surveillance without court oversight, without all of the standard checks and balances that one would expect.” ~ Edward Snowden
- “I think the oversight is great, and I think that oversight ought to be devoted almost entirely to the question is this being done at market you know. In other words, you want to make sure that the government isn’t investing foolishly. But you don’t want to care about which congressional districts it goes to or whether banks get favored over.” ~ Warren Buffett
- “Being here in Detroit, our public education in this city is – it’s shocking. And the oversight of it and the oversight of the teachers and the funding is nonexistent, and the priority that’s put on it is so low.” ~ Mitch Albom
- “A disappointment is not generally an oversight. It might just be the best one can do the situation being what it is. The genuine error is to quit attempting.” ~ B. F. Skinner
