Motivational Quotes

Government

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

- Nepos, Cornelius

Best Quotes about Government

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

Wallis, W. Allen

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

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

Limbaugh, Rush

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Voltaire

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

Hospers, John

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

Updike, John

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

Crockett, Davy

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

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

Baluch, Joy

10.

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

11.

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

Gladstone, William E.

12.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

13.

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

14.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

18.

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

Friedman, Milton

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.

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

Reston, James

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Bertrand Russell

24.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

25.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.

Baxter, Beverley

30.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Roosevelt, Theodore

31.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

32.

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

Reston, James

33.

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

Jackson, Andrew

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Marshalov, Boris

37.

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

38.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

39.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

40.

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

41.

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

Reagan, Ronald

42.

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

Updike, John

43.

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

44.

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

Bunting, Basil

45.

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

46.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

47.

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

48.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

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

Jefferson, Thomas