Motivational Quotes

Government

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

- Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

Best Quotes about Government

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

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

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

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

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

10.

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

Truman, Harry S

11.

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

12.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

13.

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

Baxter, Beverley

14.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

15.

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

16.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

17.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Updike, John

21.

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

Friedman, Milton

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

24.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

25.

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

Melbourne, Lord

26.

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

27.

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

Burns, George

28.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

29.

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

Gardner, John W.

30.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

31.

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

32.

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

Kempton, Murray

33.

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

Proverb, French

34.

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

35.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

36.

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

37.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

38.

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

Hume, David

39.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

43.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

44.

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

Caldwell, John S.

45.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

46.

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

Russell, Bertrand

47.

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

Bob Wells

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)