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

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

Amsterdam, Maury

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Bertrand Russell

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

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

Richard M. Nixon

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

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

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 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

10.

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.

11.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

12.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

13.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

Proverb, French

17.

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

18.

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

Murray, Bill

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Gardner, John W.

22.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

23.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

24.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

25.

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

Douglas, William O.

26.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

27.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

28.

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

29.

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

Kempton, Murray

30.

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

Fred Thompson

31.

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

Crockett, Davy

32.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

33.

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

34.

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

Caldwell, John S.

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

Truman, Harry S

38.

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

Themistocles

39.

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

Pittacus

40.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

41.

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

42.

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

Reston, James

43.

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

44.

For every action there is an equal and opposite government program.

Bob Wells

45.

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

Updike, John

46.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

47.

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

Baluch, Joy

48.

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

49.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

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