Motivational Quotes

Government

Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain.

- Herbert, A. P.

Best Quotes about Government

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

Hospers, John

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

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.

Baluch, Joy

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

Voltaire

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

Reston, James

10.

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

11.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

12.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

13.

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

14.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

15.

It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.

Voltaire

16.

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

Proverb, French

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

Jackson, Andrew

21.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

22.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

23.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

24.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

26.

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

27.

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

H. L. Mencken

28.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

30.

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

Gardner, John W.

31.

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

32.

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

Updike, John

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

36.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

37.

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

Caldwell, John S.

38.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

39.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

40.

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

Dulles, John Foster

41.

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

42.

Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.

Solon

43.

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.

44.

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

Updike, John

45.

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

46.

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

Cervantes, Miguel De

47.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

48.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

50.

Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.