Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Bertrand Russell

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

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

Russell, Bertrand

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.

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

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

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

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

Bob Wells

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

10.

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

Friedman, Milton

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Pittacus

14.

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

15.

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

Bunting, Basil

16.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

18.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

19.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

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.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

23.

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

Crockett, Davy

24.

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

25.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

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.

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

Hospers, John

28.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

29.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

30.

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

Jackson, Andrew

31.

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

32.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Caldwell, John S.

34.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

35.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

36.

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

Solon

37.

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

Kempton, Murray

38.

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

39.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

40.

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

41.

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

Lawson, Nigel

42.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Reagan, Ronald

43.

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

44.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

45.

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

46.

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

47.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

48.

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

Updike, John

49.

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

50.

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