Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

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

Einstein, Albert

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

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

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

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

10.

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

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

13.

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

Themistocles

14.

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

Richard M. Nixon

15.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

16.

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

Gladstone, William E.

17.

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

Proverb, French

18.

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

19.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

20.

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

Bob Wells

21.

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

22.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

23.

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

Welch, Robert

24.

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

25.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

26.

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

Cousin, Victor

27.

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

Pittacus

28.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

29.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

30.

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

31.

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

Crockett, Davy

32.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Burns, George

36.

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

37.

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

Bunting, Basil

38.

Sade, Marquis De

39.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Tuchman, Barbara

40.

The art of government is not to let me grow stale.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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.

42.

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

Dulles, John Foster

43.

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

Updike, John

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

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

Reagan, Ronald

47.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bastiat, Frederic