Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Limbaugh, Rush

Best Quotes about Government

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

Melbourne, Lord

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

10.

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

Richard M. Nixon

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.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

13.

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

Proverb, French

14.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

15.

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

Rostand, Jean

16.

Believe me - the Government will help you anytime it needs you.

Kocher, Gerhard

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Baxter, Beverley

20.

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

Friedman, Milton

21.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

22.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

23.

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

Bob Wells

24.

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

Pittacus

25.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

26.

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

Reagan, Ronald

27.

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

28.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

29.

What we should be asking is not whether we need a big government or small government, but how we can create a smarter and better government.

President Barack Obama

30.

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

31.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

32.

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

33.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

34.

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

Dulles, John Foster

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Einstein, Albert

38.

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

Reston, James

39.

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

Updike, John

40.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

41.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

43.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

44.

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

45.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

H. L. Mencken

46.

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

Burns, George

47.

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.

48.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

50.

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