Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Wotton, Sir Henry

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

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

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

H. L. Mencken

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

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

Bob Wells

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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

Pittacus

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

Proverb, French

10.

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

Hume, David

11.

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.

Limbaugh, Rush

12.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

13.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

14.

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

15.

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

Baxter, Beverley

16.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

17.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

18.

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

Jackson, Andrew

19.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

20.

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

Cousin, Victor

21.

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

Melbourne, Lord

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

25.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

26.

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

Burns, George

27.

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

George W. Bush

28.

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

Hospers, John

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

The constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government off the backs of people.

Douglas, William O.

33.

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

34.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

35.

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

Themistocles

36.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

37.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

38.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

39.

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

Marshalov, Boris

40.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

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.

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

Caldwell, John S.

43.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

45.

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

46.

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

Rostand, Jean

47.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

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

Reston, James

50.

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

Wallis, W. Allen