Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Murray, Bill

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Solon

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

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

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

Hospers, John

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

Jefferson, Thomas

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

10.

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

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Marshalov, Boris

16.

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

Updike, John

17.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Friedman, Milton

18.

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

Caldwell, John S.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Reston, James

24.

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

25.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

26.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

Gladstone, William E.

27.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

28.

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

29.

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

Fred Thompson

30.

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

Bertrand Russell

31.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Welch, Robert

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

38.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

39.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

40.

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

Durant, William J.

41.

Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.

Igleheart, Austin

42.

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

Updike, John

43.

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

44.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

45.

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

Jackson, Andrew

46.

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

Hume, David

47.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

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.

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

Kempton, Murray

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