Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Murray, Bill

Best Quotes about Government

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

Bertrand Russell

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

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

Updike, John

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Burns, George

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

Gardner, John W.

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

Reston, James

10.

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.

11.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

12.

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

Fred Thompson

13.

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

14.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

15.

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

Proverb, French

16.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Bunting, Basil

17.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

18.

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

Dulles, John Foster

19.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

20.

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

Welch, Robert

21.

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

Themistocles

22.

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

Marshalov, Boris

23.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

24.

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

Lawson, Nigel

25.

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

Murray, Bill

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

30.

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

Crockett, Davy

31.

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

32.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

33.

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

34.

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

George W. Bush

35.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

36.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

37.

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.

38.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

39.

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

40.

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

Voltaire

41.

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

42.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

43.

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

44.

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

Updike, John

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

48.

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

Melbourne, Lord

49.

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

H. L. Mencken

50.

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