Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Reston, James

Best Quotes about Government

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service]

Herodotus

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

Bastiat, Frederic

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Einstein, Albert

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

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

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.

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

Dulles, John Foster

12.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

13.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

14.

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

Bertrand Russell

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

17.

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

18.

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

19.

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

20.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

21.

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

22.

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

Solon

23.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

26.

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

H. L. Mencken

27.

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

Cervantes, Miguel De

28.

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

Herbert, A. P.

29.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

30.

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

31.

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

Bob Wells

32.

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.

33.

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

Hume, David

34.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

35.

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

36.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

37.

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

38.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

39.

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

40.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

42.

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

43.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

44.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

45.

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

Reagan, Ronald

46.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

47.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

48.

Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.

Baluch, Joy

49.

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

50.

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