Motivational Quotes

Government

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

- Jefferson, Thomas

Best Quotes about Government

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

The government can destroy wealth but it cannot create wealth, which is the product of labor and management working with creation.

Murray, Bill

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

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

Kocher, Gerhard

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

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Bunting, Basil

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

10.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

Voltaire

12.

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

13.

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

14.

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Nixon, Richard M.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

21.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

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

Hospers, John

23.

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

24.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

25.

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

Lawson, Nigel

26.

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

Updike, John

27.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

28.

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

29.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

30.

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

Caldwell, John S.

31.

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

Marshalov, Boris

32.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

33.

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

Gladstone, William E.

34.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

35.

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

Friedman, Milton

36.

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

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Herbert, A. P.

41.

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

Gardner, John W.

42.

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

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.

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

45.

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

Baxter, Beverley

46.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

47.

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

Hume, David

48.

Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn't.