Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

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

Friedman, Milton

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

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

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

Hospers, John

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

Pittacus

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 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

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

10.

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

Melbourne, Lord

11.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

12.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

16.

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

17.

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

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.

An ambassador is an honest person sent to lie abroad for their country.

Wotton, Sir Henry

20.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

21.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

22.

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

Jackson, Andrew

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

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

Kempton, Murray

25.

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

Hume, David

26.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

27.

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

George W. Bush

28.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

29.

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

Burns, George

30.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

31.

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

Friedman, Milton

32.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

33.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

34.

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

Baluch, Joy

35.

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

36.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

37.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

38.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Johnson, Samuel

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

43.

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

44.

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

Russell, Bertrand

45.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

46.

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

Gladstone, William E.

47.

Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.

Reagan, Ronald

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bob Wells