Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Wotton, Sir Henry

Best Quotes about Government

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

Shaw, George Bernard

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

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

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

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

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

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

Baxter, Beverley

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.

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

12.

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

13.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

14.

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

Bunting, Basil

15.

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

Cousin, Victor

16.

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

Melbourne, Lord

17.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

20.

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

21.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

24.

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

Marshalov, Boris

25.

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

Richard M. Nixon

26.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

27.

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

Reston, James

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Themistocles

33.

Believe me - the Government will help you anytime it needs you.

Kocher, Gerhard

34.

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

Friedman, Milton

35.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

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.

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

Burns, George

38.

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

Hospers, John

39.

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

Voltaire

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Dulles, John Foster

42.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

44.

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

Bob Wells

45.

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

Hume, David

46.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

47.

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