Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Government

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

Kocher, Gerhard

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

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

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Thoreau, Henry David

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

Updike, John

10.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

Lever, Leslie Baron

12.

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

13.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

17.

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

Russell, Bertrand

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Marshalov, Boris

21.

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

22.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

23.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

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

Kempton, Murray

25.

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

H. L. Mencken

26.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

27.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

28.

The point to remember is what government gives it must first take away

Caldwell, John S.

29.

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

Welch, Robert

30.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

31.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Gladstone, William E.

35.

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

36.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

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

Burns, George

39.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

40.

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

Themistocles

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Hospers, John

44.

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

45.

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

Hume, David

46.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

47.

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

48.

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

Jackson, Andrew

49.

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

Reagan, Ronald

50.

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