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

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

Hume, David

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

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

Murray, Bill

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

Fred Thompson

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.

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

Hospers, John

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Jefferson, Thomas

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Burns, George

13.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

14.

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

H. L. Mencken

15.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

Bunting, Basil

19.

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

20.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

21.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

22.

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

Kempton, Murray

23.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

24.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

25.

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

George W. Bush

26.

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

Baluch, Joy

27.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

28.

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

Reston, James

29.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

30.

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

Pittacus

31.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

32.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

37.

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

38.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

39.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

40.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

41.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

42.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

43.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Reagan, Ronald

48.

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

Welch, Robert

49.

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