Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Reagan, Ronald

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

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

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

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

Bunting, Basil

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

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

Dulles, John Foster

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

Bertrand Russell

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

10.

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

Welch, Robert

11.

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

12.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

13.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

18.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

19.

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

Pittacus

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.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Marshalov, Boris

25.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

26.

Well, fancy giving money to the Government! Might as well have put it down the drain.

Herbert, A. P.

27.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

28.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

29.

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

30.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

31.

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

32.

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

Douglas, William O.

33.

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

Themistocles

34.

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

35.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

36.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.

Lippmann, Walter

37.

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

Fred Thompson

38.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

39.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

40.

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

H. L. Mencken

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Richard M. Nixon

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Melbourne, Lord

47.

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.

48.

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

Gardner, John W.

49.

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

Bob Wells

50.

There is something to be said for government by a great aristocracy which has furnished leaders to the nation in peace and war for generations; even a democrat like myself must admit this. But there is absolutely nothing to be said for government by a plutocracy, for government by men very powerful in certain lines and gifted with the money touch, but with ideals which in their essence are merely those of so many glorified pawnbrokers.

Roosevelt, Theodore