Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Voltaire

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

Baxter, Beverley

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

Welch, Robert

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

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

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

Amsterdam, Maury

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

Baluch, Joy

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

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

Reagan, Ronald

10.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

11.

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

Friedman, Milton

12.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

13.

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

Gardner, John W.

14.

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

Jackson, Andrew

15.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

22.

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

Reagan, Ronald

23.

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

Pittacus

24.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

25.

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

26.

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

Kempton, Murray

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

30.

The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life -- this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.

O'Rourke, P. J.

31.

Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

Lever, Leslie Baron

32.

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

33.

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

Fred Thompson

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.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

36.

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

37.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

38.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

39.

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

Proverb, French

40.

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

Murray, Bill

41.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

42.

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

H. L. Mencken

43.

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

Crockett, Davy

44.

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

45.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

46.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

47.

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

48.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.

President Barack Obama

49.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

50.

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

Updike, John