Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Voltaire

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

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Voltaire

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

Kempton, Murray

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

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

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

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

Reston, James

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

Marshalov, Boris

10.

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.

11.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

14.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

15.

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

Themistocles

16.

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

17.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

18.

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

19.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

20.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

21.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

William H. Borah

22.

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.

23.

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

Russell, Bertrand

24.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

25.

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

Bunting, Basil

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Lawson, Nigel

29.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

30.

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

31.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

32.

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

George W. Bush

33.

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

Solon

34.

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

35.

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

Cousin, Victor

36.

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

Bertrand Russell

37.

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

38.

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

Melbourne, Lord

39.

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

40.

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

Reston, James

41.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.