Motivational Quotes

Government

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

- Bastiat, Frederic

Best Quotes about Government

What we should be asking is not whether we need a big government or small government, but how we can create a smarter and better government.

President Barack Obama

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

Socrates

Who so taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves so to be.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

Pittacus

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Johnson, Samuel

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service]

Herodotus

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Truman, Harry S

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Updike, John

10.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Friedman, Milton

11.

Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter. To both parties it is emphatically a machine: to the discontented, a taxing-machine; to the contented, a machine for securing property. Its duties and its faults are not those of a father, but of an active parish-constable.

Carlyle, Thomas

12.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Melbourne, Lord

13.

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Nixon, Richard M.

14.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

15.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

16.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.

Igleheart, Austin

18.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

19.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

20.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

21.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Voltaire

22.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

23.

The point to remember is what government gives it must first take away

Caldwell, John S.

24.

The mechanism that directs government cannot be virtuous, because it is impossible to thwart every crime, to protect oneself from every criminal without being criminal too; that which directs corrupt mankind must be corrupt itself; and it will never be by means of virtue, virtue being inert and passive, that you will maintain control over vice, which is ever active: the governor must be more energetic than the governed.

Sade, Marquis De

25.

In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.

Einstein, Albert

26.

The government must always be a step ahead of the popular movement.

Boytzwnburg, Count

27.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

28.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

29.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

30.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

31.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

32.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

33.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Bunting, Basil

34.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Friedman, Milton

35.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

36.

The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.

Themistocles

37.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

William H. Borah

38.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

39.

Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.

Baxter, Beverley

40.

If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.

Noonan, Peggy

41.

The constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

Douglas, William O.

42.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

43.

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.

Wallis, W. Allen

44.

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.