Motivational Quotes

Government

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

- Bertrand Russell

Best Quotes about Government

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

Bunting, Basil

In our consumer confidence surveys, we ask people whether they think government economic policy is good, fair, or poor. Increasingly, the answer we get is just plain laughter.

Schmiedeskamp, Jay

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

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

Voltaire

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Reagan, Ronald

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

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

10.

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

11.

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

12.

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

Hospers, John

13.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

14.

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, then everybody disagrees.

Marshalov, Boris

15.

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

16.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill

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.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

20.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

21.

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

22.

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

Douglas, William O.

23.

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

24.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Voltaire

25.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

26.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

27.

The government can destroy wealth but it cannot create wealth, which is the product of labor and management working with creation.

Murray, Bill

28.

Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Washington, George

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Hume, David

32.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Burns, George

33.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Updike, John

34.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

36.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

37.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Lippmann, Walter

38.

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.

Mirabeau, Comte De

39.

Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

42.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

43.

Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.

Baluch, Joy

44.

The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place.

Welch, Robert

45.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Roosevelt, Theodore

46.

Any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have.

Thomas Heatherwick

47.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

Locke, John

48.

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

Cervantes, Miguel De

49.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. L. Mencken

50.

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

Caldwell, John S.