Motivational Quotes

Government

Office without pay makes thieves.

- Proverb, German

Best Quotes about Government

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

Limbaugh, Rush

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

Murray, Bill

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

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

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

10.

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

Caldwell, John S.

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

Russell, Bertrand

13.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

14.

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

15.

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

Bunting, Basil

16.

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

Melbourne, Lord

17.

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

Reagan, Ronald

18.

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

Richard M. Nixon

19.

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

Lawson, Nigel

20.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

21.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

22.

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

23.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

24.

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

Updike, John

25.

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

26.

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

27.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

Kempton, Murray

29.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Roosevelt, Theodore

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

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

33.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

34.

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

35.

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

Reston, James

36.

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

37.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

38.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Friedman, Milton

39.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

40.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Johnson, Samuel

41.

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

Bertrand Russell

42.

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

43.

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

44.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

45.

The government must always be a step ahead of the popular movement.

Boytzwnburg, Count

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.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Bastiat, Frederic

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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