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

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

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

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

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

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

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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

Pittacus

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

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

10.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

11.

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

12.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

13.

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

Rostand, Jean

14.

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

15.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

16.

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

Hospers, John

17.

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

Voltaire

18.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

19.

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

Melbourne, Lord

20.

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.

21.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

22.

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

Hume, David

23.

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

Reagan, Ronald

24.

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.

25.

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

Bob Wells

26.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

27.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

28.

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

Solon

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

34.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

35.

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

36.

Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn't.

Kocher, Gerhard

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Reston, James

41.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Einstein, Albert

42.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

43.

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

Caldwell, John S.

44.

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

Welch, Robert

45.

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

Gardner, John W.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

Burns, George

50.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon