Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Richard M. Nixon

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

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

Solon

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

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

The government can destroy wealth but it cannot create wealth, which is the product of labor and management working with creation.

Murray, Bill

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

Dulles, John Foster

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

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

10.

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

Jackson, Andrew

11.

Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.

Baxter, Beverley

12.

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

Fred Thompson

13.

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

H. L. Mencken

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Reston, James

18.

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

19.

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

Gardner, John W.

20.

It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.

Kempton, Murray

21.

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

Reagan, Ronald

22.

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

Updike, John

23.

The ship of state is the only known vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

24.

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

25.

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

Bob Wells

26.

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

Reagan, Ronald

27.

It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.

Gladstone, William E.

28.

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

29.

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

George W. Bush

30.

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

31.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

32.

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

33.

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

Hospers, John

34.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

36.

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

37.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

38.

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

Themistocles

39.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

40.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

41.

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

Updike, John

42.

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

43.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

44.

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

Durant, William J.

45.

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

Hume, David

46.

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

47.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

48.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

49.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

50.

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.