Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Government

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

Baluch, Joy

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

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

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

Gladstone, William E.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

Voltaire

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

Friedman, Milton

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

Gardner, John W.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

10.

Of the best rulers, The people only know that they exist; the next best they love and praise the next they fear; and the next they revile. When they do not command the people's faith, some will lose faith in them, and then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, the people all remark, We have done it ourselves.

Lao-Tzu

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

14.

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

Douglas, William O.

15.

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

Herbert, A. P.

16.

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

17.

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

Kempton, Murray

18.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

19.

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

20.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

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

23.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

24.

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

Hospers, John

25.

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

Dulles, John Foster

26.

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

Updike, John

27.

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

28.

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

Russell, Bertrand

29.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

30.

Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Washington, George

31.

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

Bertrand Russell

32.

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

33.

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

34.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

35.

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

Reagan, Ronald

36.

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

37.

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

Jackson, Andrew

38.

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

Einstein, Albert

39.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

43.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

44.

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

Hume, David

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

Truman, Harry S

49.

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

50.

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