Motivational Quotes

Government

An ambassador is an honest person sent to lie abroad for their country.

- Wotton, Sir Henry

Best Quotes about Government

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

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

Hospers, John

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Truman, Harry S

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

Jackson, Andrew

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Bob Wells

10.

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

Crockett, Davy

11.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

12.

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

Gardner, John W.

13.

Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.

Baluch, Joy

14.

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

15.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

16.

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

17.

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

18.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

Socrates

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Proverb, French

24.

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

Voltaire

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Rostand, Jean

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.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

31.

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

Caldwell, John S.

32.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

33.

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

Friedman, Milton

34.

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

35.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

36.

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

Reston, James

37.

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

Solon

38.

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

39.

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

40.

If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.

Noonan, Peggy

41.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

42.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

43.

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

44.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

45.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

46.

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

Reagan, Ronald

47.

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

Friedman, Milton

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon