Motivational Quotes

Government

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

- Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

Best Quotes about Government

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

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

Melbourne, Lord

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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

Updike, John

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

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

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

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

Hume, David

13.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Friedman, Milton

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

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

19.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

20.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

21.

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

22.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

23.

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

24.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

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

Baluch, Joy

26.

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

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.

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

Truman, Harry S

29.

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

Baxter, Beverley

30.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

31.

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

Welch, Robert

32.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

33.

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

34.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

35.

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

36.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

37.

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

Solon

38.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

39.

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

40.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

42.

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

43.

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

Rostand, Jean

44.

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

Caldwell, John S.

45.

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

46.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

47.

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

Durant, William J.

48.

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

Hospers, John

49.

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