Motivational Quotes

Government

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Government

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

Jackson, Andrew

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.

Wallis, W. Allen

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

Reston, James

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

Fred Thompson

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

Updike, John

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

The Athenians govern the Greeks; I govern the Athenians; you, my wife, govern me; your son governs you.

Themistocles

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

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

10.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

11.

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

Marshalov, Boris

12.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

13.

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

Bob Wells

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

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

Pittacus

16.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

17.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

18.

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

Murray, Bill

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Caldwell, John S.

23.

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

Richard M. Nixon

24.

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

Lawson, Nigel

25.

The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

27.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

28.

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

29.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

30.

In the councils of a state, the question is not so much, what ought to be done? As, what can be done?

Proverb, French

31.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

32.

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

Reagan, Ronald

33.

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

34.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

35.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hume, David

39.

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

H. L. Mencken

40.

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

41.

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

Welch, Robert

42.

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

43.

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

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.

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

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von