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

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

Melbourne, Lord

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

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

Solon

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

Kempton, Murray

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

Baluch, Joy

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

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Crockett, Davy

10.

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

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

13.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

14.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

15.

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

Pittacus

16.

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

17.

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

Caldwell, John S.

18.

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

19.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

20.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

22.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

23.

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

24.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

25.

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

26.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

27.

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

Burns, George

28.

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

Gladstone, William E.

29.

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

30.

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

Reagan, Ronald

31.

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

32.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

33.

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

Murray, Bill

34.

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

35.

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

Hospers, John

36.

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

Hume, David

37.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. L. Mencken

38.

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

Reston, James

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.

Dulles, John Foster

42.

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

43.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

44.

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

45.

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

Bunting, Basil

46.

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

Fred Thompson

47.

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Jefferson, Thomas

48.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

49.

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

Russell, Bertrand

50.

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