Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Durant, William J.

Best Quotes about Government

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Hume, David

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

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Limbaugh, Rush

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

10.

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

Themistocles

11.

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

Murray, Bill

12.

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

13.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

14.

We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

17.

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

Reagan, Ronald

18.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

19.

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

Voltaire

20.

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

Russell, Bertrand

21.

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

22.

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

Kempton, Murray

23.

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

24.

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.

25.

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

26.

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

Bertrand Russell

27.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

28.

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

Jackson, Andrew

29.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Baluch, Joy

33.

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

Updike, John

34.

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

Douglas, William O.

35.

The whole country is one vast insane asylum and they're letting the worst patients run the place.

Welch, Robert

36.

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

Reston, James

37.

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

38.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

39.

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Burns, George

40.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

41.

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

Reagan, Ronald

42.

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

43.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.

President Barack Obama

44.

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.

45.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

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