Motivational Quotes

Government

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

- Chapman, John Jay

Best Quotes about Government

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.

Mirabeau, Comte De

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.

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

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

Fred Thompson

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

Bastiat, Frederic

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

Friedman, Milton

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

Murray, Bill

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

Thomas Heatherwick

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

10.

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

Reston, James

11.

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

12.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

13.

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

14.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

15.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

16.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

17.

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

Kempton, Murray

18.

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Jefferson, Thomas

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Reagan, Ronald

22.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

23.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

24.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

25.

Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn't.

Kocher, Gerhard

26.

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

27.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

32.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

33.

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

Melbourne, Lord

34.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

35.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

36.

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

37.

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

Richard M. Nixon

38.

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

Baxter, Beverley

39.

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

Herbert, A. P.

40.

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

Russell, Bertrand

41.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

42.

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

Baluch, Joy

43.

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

Pittacus

44.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

45.

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

46.

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

Hume, David

47.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

48.

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

49.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

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

Reston, James