Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

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

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

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

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

Cousin, Victor

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Jefferson, Thomas

10.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

12.

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

Gardner, John W.

13.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

14.

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

15.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Friedman, Milton

17.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

18.

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

Welch, Robert

19.

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

Friedman, Milton

20.

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

21.

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

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

25.

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

26.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

27.

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

28.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

29.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

30.

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

Kempton, Murray

31.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

32.

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

Proverb, French

33.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

34.

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

Dulles, John Foster

35.

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

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.

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

Burns, George

38.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

39.

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

Bunting, Basil

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Melbourne, Lord

42.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

43.

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

44.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

45.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

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

48.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

49.

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

50.

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