Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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

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

Pittacus

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

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

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Limbaugh, Rush

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

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.

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

Voltaire

11.

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

12.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

Melbourne, Lord

14.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

15.

The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

16.

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

17.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

18.

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

Hume, David

19.

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

20.

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

21.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Roosevelt, Theodore

22.

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

Marshalov, Boris

23.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

25.

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

26.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

27.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Updike, John

28.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

29.

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

Lawson, Nigel

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

36.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

37.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

38.

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

Crockett, Davy

39.

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

Welch, Robert

40.

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

Bob Wells

41.

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

42.

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

Richard M. Nixon

43.

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

Jackson, Andrew

44.

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

Douglas, William O.

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.

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

47.

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

Truman, Harry S

48.

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

Fred Thompson

49.

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

50.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken