Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Fred Thompson

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

Proverb, French

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

Burns, George

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

Reagan, Ronald

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

10.

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

Friedman, Milton

11.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

12.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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.

15.

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

Themistocles

16.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

17.

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

18.

The point to remember is what government gives it must first take away

Caldwell, John S.

19.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

20.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

21.

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

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.

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

25.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

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

Douglas, William O.

27.

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

Marshalov, Boris

28.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

29.

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

Hospers, John

30.

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

31.

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

Solon

32.

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

33.

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

Russell, Bertrand

34.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

35.

Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.

Lever, Leslie Baron

36.

If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.

Noonan, Peggy

37.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

38.

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

39.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

41.

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

Jackson, Andrew

42.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich