Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Gladstone, William E.

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

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

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

Reston, James

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

Wallis, W. Allen

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.

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

10.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

11.

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

Gardner, John W.

12.

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

Themistocles

13.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

14.

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

Solon

15.

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

Baxter, Beverley

16.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

17.

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

18.

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

Voltaire

19.

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

Lawson, Nigel

20.

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

21.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

22.

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

23.

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

Russell, Bertrand

24.

The body politic, as well as the human body, begins to die as soon as it is born, and carries itself the causes of its destruction.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

28.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury

29.

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

30.

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

Fred Thompson

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Murray, Bill

34.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Reagan, Ronald

38.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

39.

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

Einstein, Albert

40.

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

41.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

44.

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

Baluch, Joy

45.

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

Hospers, John

46.

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

47.

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

48.

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

49.

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

Truman, Harry S

50.

It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.