Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Douglas, William O.

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

Gladstone, William E.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Truman, Harry S

10.

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

George W. Bush

11.

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

12.

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

Reston, James

13.

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

Friedman, Milton

14.

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

15.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

16.

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

Bunting, Basil

17.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

18.

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

Themistocles

19.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

21.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

22.

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.

23.

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

24.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

25.

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

26.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

27.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

28.

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

Reagan, Ronald

29.

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

30.

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

Solon

31.

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

32.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

Kempton, Murray

33.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

34.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

35.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

36.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

Hume, David

40.

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

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.

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

Friedman, Milton

43.

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

44.

In the councils of a state, the question is not so much, what ought to be done? As, what can be done?

Proverb, French

45.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

46.

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

Reagan, Ronald

47.

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