Motivational Quotes

Government

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

- Chapman, John Jay

Best Quotes about Government

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.

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

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

13.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

16.

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

Reagan, Ronald

17.

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

18.

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

Jackson, Andrew

19.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

21.

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.

Limbaugh, Rush

22.

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

Gardner, John W.

23.

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

Fred Thompson

24.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

25.

Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn't.

Kocher, Gerhard

26.

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

27.

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

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

29.

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

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.

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

Updike, John

32.

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

33.

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

Marshalov, Boris

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Voltaire

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

40.

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

Bunting, Basil

41.

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

Hospers, John

42.

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

43.

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

Hume, David

44.

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

45.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

46.

The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

47.

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

Friedman, Milton

48.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.