Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Alcott, Amos Bronson

Best Quotes about Government

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

Updike, John

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Updike, John

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

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

Wallis, W. Allen

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

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

Cousin, Victor

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

Themistocles

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

10.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

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

Herbert, A. P.

12.

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

13.

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

Solon

14.

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

Voltaire

15.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

16.

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.

17.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

18.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

19.

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

20.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

Gladstone, William E.

24.

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

Friedman, Milton

25.

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

Reston, James

26.

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

27.

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

Melbourne, Lord

28.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

George W. Bush

31.

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

Bunting, Basil

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Murray, Bill

36.

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Friedman, Milton

39.

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

Truman, Harry S

40.

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

41.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

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.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

Locke, John

44.

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

Richard M. Nixon

45.

In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.

Einstein, Albert

46.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

47.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

48.

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.

49.

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

Marshalov, Boris

50.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson