Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Hume, David

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

Limbaugh, Rush

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

Friedman, Milton

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. L. Mencken

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

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

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

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

10.

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

Voltaire

11.

In the councils of a state, the question is not so much, what ought to be done? As, what can be done?

Proverb, French

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

Einstein, Albert

16.

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

17.

In our consumer confidence surveys, we ask people whether they think government economic policy is good, fair, or poor. Increasingly, the answer we get is just plain laughter.

Schmiedeskamp, Jay

18.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

19.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

20.

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

Themistocles

21.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

22.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

23.

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

Fred Thompson

24.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

25.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

26.

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

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.

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

Pittacus

29.

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

30.

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

Updike, John

31.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

32.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

33.

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

34.

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

Marshalov, Boris

35.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

36.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

37.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

38.

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

39.

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

Richard M. Nixon

40.

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

Reagan, Ronald

41.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

Friedman, Milton

43.

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

44.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

45.

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.

46.

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

Cousin, Victor

47.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

48.

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

Reston, James

49.

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

50.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury