Motivational Quotes

Government

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

- Chapman, John Jay

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Bob Wells

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

Hume, David

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

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

Richard M. Nixon

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

Updike, John

10.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Shaw, George Bernard

11.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

12.

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

Dulles, John Foster

13.

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

14.

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

Marshalov, Boris

15.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

16.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

17.

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

Friedman, Milton

18.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

19.

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

Jackson, Andrew

20.

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

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

23.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

24.

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

Reagan, Ronald

25.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

26.

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

27.

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

28.

When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects,this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.

Heinlein, Robert

29.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Gardner, John W.

34.

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

Baluch, Joy

35.

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

36.

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

Pittacus

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service]

Herodotus

39.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

40.

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

Einstein, Albert

41.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

42.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Kempton, Murray

47.

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

48.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

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