Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

Thomas Heatherwick

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

Gardner, John W.

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

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

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

Hume, David

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

Baluch, Joy

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

Reston, James

10.

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

Russell, Bertrand

11.

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

12.

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

Fred Thompson

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

20.

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

Reagan, Ronald

21.

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

22.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

23.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Reagan, Ronald

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.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

26.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.

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

28.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Bob Wells

32.

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

Kempton, Murray

33.

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

Gladstone, William E.

34.

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.

35.

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

Pittacus

36.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

37.

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

38.

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

Bunting, Basil

39.

Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.

Mills, C. Wright

40.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

41.

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

42.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Melbourne, Lord

43.

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

Voltaire

44.

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

Hospers, John

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.