Motivational Quotes

Government

Office without pay makes thieves.

- Proverb, German

Best Quotes about Government

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Jefferson, Thomas

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.

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

Dulles, John Foster

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

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

Updike, John

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

10.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

11.

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

Reagan, Ronald

12.

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

13.

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

Melbourne, Lord

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The art of government is not to let me grow stale.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

19.

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

Caldwell, John S.

20.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

21.

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

Themistocles

22.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

26.

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

Burns, George

27.

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

Richard M. Nixon

28.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

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

Updike, John

30.

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

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.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

33.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

34.

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

35.

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill

36.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

37.

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

Bunting, Basil

38.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

39.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

41.

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

42.

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

43.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

44.

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

Fred Thompson

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.

President Barack Obama

46.

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

47.

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

Friedman, Milton

48.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

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

Pittacus

50.

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