Motivational Quotes

Government

Fear is the foundation of most government.

- Adams, John

Best Quotes about Government

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.

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

The government must always be a step ahead of the popular movement.

Boytzwnburg, Count

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

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

Updike, John

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

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

Kempton, Murray

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

10.

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

11.

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

Bunting, Basil

12.

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

13.

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Nixon, Richard M.

14.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

Cousin, Victor

17.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

18.

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

19.

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

Baxter, Beverley

20.

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

Richard M. Nixon

21.

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

Russell, Bertrand

22.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

23.

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

Voltaire

24.

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

Jackson, Andrew

25.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

26.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

27.

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

Hume, David

28.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

32.

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

Voltaire

33.

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

Reagan, Ronald

34.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

Douglas, William O.

36.

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

37.

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

Reagan, Ronald

38.

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

Baluch, Joy

39.

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

Marshalov, Boris

40.

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

Gladstone, William E.

41.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

43.

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

Murray, Bill

44.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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.

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

Truman, Harry S

47.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

48.

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

Bob Wells

49.

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

50.

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