Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Kocher, Gerhard

Best Quotes about Government

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

Richard M. Nixon

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

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

Solon

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

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

Burns, George

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

Hume, David

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

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Einstein, Albert

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

10.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

11.

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

12.

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

Baluch, Joy

13.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

14.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

15.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

16.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

17.

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

Caldwell, John S.

18.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

19.

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

Dulles, John Foster

20.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

21.

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

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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

Jackson, Andrew

24.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

25.

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

26.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

27.

In our consumer confidence surveys, we ask people whether they think government economic policy is good, fair, or poor. Increasingly, the answer we get is just plain laughter.

Schmiedeskamp, Jay

28.

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.

29.

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

Crockett, Davy

30.

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

31.

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

Rostand, Jean

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Gardner, John W.

35.

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

36.

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

Gladstone, William E.

37.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

38.

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.

39.

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

Douglas, William O.

40.

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

Truman, Harry S

41.

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

Reston, James

42.

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