Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Bertrand Russell

Best Quotes about Government

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

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

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

Bastiat, Frederic

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

Solon

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

Hospers, John

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Einstein, Albert

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

Voltaire

10.

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

Melbourne, Lord

11.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

12.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

14.

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

Dulles, John Foster

15.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

16.

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

Friedman, Milton

17.

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

18.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

19.

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

20.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

21.

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

Themistocles

22.

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.

23.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

24.

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

Proverb, French

25.

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

Baluch, Joy

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Updike, John

29.

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

30.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

31.

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

32.

Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet do well enough, and are well look'd upon?

Cervantes, Miguel De

33.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

34.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

35.

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

36.

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

Richard M. Nixon

37.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

38.

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

Friedman, Milton

39.

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

40.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

41.

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

Gardner, John W.

42.

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

Herbert, A. P.

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

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

Gladstone, William E.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Reagan, Ronald

48.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

49.

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

Pittacus

50.

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