Motivational Quotes

Government

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

- Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

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

Limbaugh, Rush

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

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

Gladstone, William E.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

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

Baluch, Joy

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

10.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Richard M. Nixon

11.

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

George W. Bush

12.

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

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.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

15.

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

Bob Wells

16.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

17.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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.

19.

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

Douglas, William O.

20.

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

21.

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

Cousin, Victor

22.

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

23.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

24.

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

25.

Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Washington, George

26.

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

Gardner, John W.

27.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

28.

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

29.

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

Lawson, Nigel

30.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

31.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

32.

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

33.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

34.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

35.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

36.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

37.

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

38.

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

Friedman, Milton

39.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Truman, Harry S

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

49.

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

50.

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