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

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 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

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

Burns, George

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

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

Kempton, Murray

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

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

Murray, Bill

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

Fred Thompson

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

10.

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

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Einstein, Albert

13.

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

Durant, William J.

14.

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

15.

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

Welch, Robert

16.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

17.

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

18.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

19.

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

Gladstone, William E.

20.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

Truman, Harry S

22.

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

23.

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

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

25.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

26.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

27.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

28.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

32.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

33.

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

34.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

35.

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

Marshalov, Boris

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Updike, John

39.

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

40.

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

Themistocles

41.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

42.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

43.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

44.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

46.

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

47.

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

Reagan, Ronald

48.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

50.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.