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

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

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

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

Reagan, Ronald

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.

Dulles, John Foster

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

Marshalov, Boris

10.

The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

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

12.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

13.

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

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

16.

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

17.

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

Bunting, Basil

18.

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

Fred Thompson

19.

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

Richard M. Nixon

20.

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

21.

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

Updike, John

22.

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

Reston, James

23.

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

Solon

24.

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

Bob Wells

25.

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

26.

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

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.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

29.

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

Rostand, Jean

30.

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

Reston, James

31.

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

32.

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

Russell, Bertrand

33.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

34.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

35.

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Nixon, Richard M.

36.

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

Lawson, Nigel

37.

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

38.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

39.

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

Themistocles

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Reagan, Ronald

42.

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

Douglas, William O.

43.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

44.

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

Murray, Bill

45.

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

46.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

47.

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

Hume, David

48.

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

Gladstone, William E.

49.

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

50.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

Locke, John