Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Wallis, W. Allen

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

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

Friedman, Milton

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Kocher, Gerhard

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

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

Thomas Heatherwick

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

Jefferson, Thomas

10.

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

Cousin, Victor

11.

Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.

Mills, C. Wright

12.

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

Murray, Bill

13.

Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.

Friedman, Milton

14.

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

Updike, John

15.

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

16.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

17.

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.

18.

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

19.

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

Marshalov, Boris

20.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

21.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Herbert, A. P.

24.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

25.

Who so taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves so to be.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

26.

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

Rostand, Jean

27.

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

28.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

29.

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

Reston, James

30.

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

31.

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

Voltaire

32.

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

Baxter, Beverley

33.

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

34.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

35.

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

36.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

37.

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

Pittacus

38.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

39.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

41.

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

42.

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

Gladstone, William E.

43.

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

44.

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

Kempton, Murray

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

49.

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

50.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German