Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Updike, John

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

Bertrand Russell

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

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

Richard M. Nixon

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

11.

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

Hume, David

12.

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

Durant, William J.

13.

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

14.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

15.

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

Themistocles

16.

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

17.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

18.

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

Reagan, Ronald

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Melbourne, Lord

23.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

24.

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

Einstein, Albert

25.

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

Voltaire

26.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

27.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

29.

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

Pittacus

30.

Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.

Baxter, Beverley

31.

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

Russell, Bertrand

32.

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

Hospers, John

33.

When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects,this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.

Heinlein, Robert

34.

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

35.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

36.

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

37.

Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

Lever, Leslie Baron

38.

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

Gardner, John W.

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

44.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

45.

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

46.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

47.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

48.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

49.

The government is huge, stupid, greedy and makes nosy, officious and dangerous intrusions into the smallest corners of life -- this much we can stand. But the real problem is that government is boring. We could cure or mitigate the other ills Washington visits on us if we could only bring ourselves to pay attention to Washington itself. But we cannot.

O'Rourke, P. J.

50.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Friedman, Milton