Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Reston, James

Best Quotes about Government

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

Jackson, Andrew

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

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

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

Bastiat, Frederic

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Pittacus

13.

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

Durant, William J.

14.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

15.

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

Bertrand Russell

16.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

17.

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.

18.

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

Welch, Robert

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

23.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

24.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

25.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

26.

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

Richard M. Nixon

27.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

28.

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

29.

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

Friedman, Milton

30.

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

Reston, James

31.

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

32.

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

Updike, John

33.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

34.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

39.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

40.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

41.

Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn't.

Kocher, Gerhard

42.

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

43.

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

Reagan, Ronald

44.

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

Lawson, Nigel

45.

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.

Hospers, John

46.

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