Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Proverb, French

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

Melbourne, Lord

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

Limbaugh, Rush

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

Hospers, John

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

Hume, David

When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects,this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.

Heinlein, Robert

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

Bob Wells

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

Cousin, Victor

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Pittacus

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

H. L. Mencken

17.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

18.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

19.

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

Douglas, William O.

20.

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

21.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

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.

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

24.

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

25.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

26.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

27.

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

28.

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

Bertrand Russell

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

32.

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

33.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

34.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

35.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Lippmann, Walter

36.

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

37.

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

Themistocles

38.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

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

41.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Gladstone, William E.

45.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

46.

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

Lawson, Nigel

47.

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

48.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

49.

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

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon