Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Marshalov, Boris

Best Quotes about Government

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

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

Fred Thompson

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

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

Voltaire

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

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

Murray, Bill

10.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

12.

The government must always be a step ahead of the popular movement.

Boytzwnburg, Count

13.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

14.

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

Burns, George

15.

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

16.

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

Durant, William J.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

20.

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

21.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

22.

Believe me - the Government will help you anytime it needs you.

Kocher, Gerhard

23.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

24.

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

Richard M. Nixon

25.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

26.

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

Crockett, Davy

27.

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

28.

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

Gardner, John W.

29.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

30.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

31.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

32.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

33.

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

34.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

35.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

36.

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

37.

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

38.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

39.

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

Solon

40.

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

41.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

42.

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

43.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

44.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

47.

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

Hospers, John

48.

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

49.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

50.

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