Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Fred Thompson

Best Quotes about Government

Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.

Igleheart, Austin

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

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

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Douglas, William O.

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.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

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

10.

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

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

13.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

14.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Melbourne, Lord

15.

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

Bertrand Russell

16.

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

Einstein, Albert

17.

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

18.

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Voltaire

19.

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

20.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

21.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

22.

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

Marshalov, Boris

23.

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

Cousin, Victor

24.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

25.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

26.

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

27.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

28.

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

Russell, Bertrand

29.

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

Gardner, John W.

30.

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

31.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

32.

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

Bunting, Basil

33.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

34.

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

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

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

Caldwell, John S.

37.

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

Hospers, John

38.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Reagan, Ronald

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Proverb, French

47.

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

48.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

49.

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

50.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.