Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Friedman, Milton

Best Quotes about Government

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

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

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

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

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

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

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.

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

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

10.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

11.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

12.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Douglas, William O.

16.

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

17.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

18.

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

Themistocles

19.

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

H. L. Mencken

20.

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

Updike, John

21.

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

Kempton, Murray

22.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.

Dulles, John Foster

27.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

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

30.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

31.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

32.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

33.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

34.

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

35.

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

Cousin, Victor

36.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

41.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

42.

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

43.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

44.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Updike, John

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.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

50.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)