Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects,this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.

Heinlein, Robert

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.

Beecher, Henry Ward

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

Gardner, John W.

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

Baxter, Beverley

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

10.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

11.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

12.

We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

13.

An ambassador is an honest person sent to lie abroad for their country.

Wotton, Sir Henry

14.

Believe me - the Government will help you anytime it needs you.

Kocher, Gerhard

15.

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

Bob Wells

16.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

17.

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

Reagan, Ronald

18.

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

Crockett, Davy

19.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

20.

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

21.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

22.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury

23.

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

H. L. Mencken

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

27.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Tuchman, Barbara

29.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Richard M. Nixon

30.

The art of government is not to let me grow stale.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

35.

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

Truman, Harry S

36.

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

Updike, John

37.

Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

39.

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

Murray, Bill

40.

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

41.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

Reagan, Ronald

42.

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.

43.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

Churchill, Winston

44.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

46.

Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.

Mills, C. Wright

47.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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.