Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Bertrand Russell

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

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

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

Bob Wells

10.

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

11.

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

Richard M. Nixon

12.

Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.

Solon

13.

Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain.

Herbert, A. P.

14.

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

15.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

16.

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.

17.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

18.

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

19.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Crockett, Davy

24.

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

Caldwell, John S.

25.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

26.

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

27.

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

Douglas, William O.

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

31.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

32.

Of the best rulers, The people only know that they exist; the next best they love and praise the next they fear; and the next they revile. When they do not command the people's faith, some will lose faith in them, and then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, the people all remark, We have done it ourselves.

Lao-Tzu

33.

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

Gardner, John W.

34.

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

Welch, Robert

35.

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

Burns, George

36.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

37.

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

Jackson, Andrew

38.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

39.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

43.

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

Hospers, John

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

47.

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

48.

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

49.

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

Updike, John

50.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von