Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain.

Herbert, A. P.

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

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

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

Reston, James

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

Updike, John

10.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

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

Jackson, Andrew

12.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

15.

Lever, Leslie Baron

16.

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

17.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Gardner, John W.

21.

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

Friedman, Milton

22.

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

23.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

24.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

25.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

26.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

27.

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

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.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Baluch, Joy

33.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

34.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

35.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

36.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

37.

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

Updike, John

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

41.

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

42.

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

Truman, Harry S

43.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

44.

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

45.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

46.

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

Voltaire

47.

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

Themistocles

48.

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

Welch, Robert

49.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

50.

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