Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Hume, David

Who so taketh in hand to frame any state or government ought to presuppose that all men are evil, and at occasions will show themselves so to be.

Raleigh, Sir Walter

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

Proverb, French

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

Hospers, John

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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

Murray, Bill

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Bunting, Basil

10.

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

11.

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

Solon

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Rostand, Jean

18.

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

Themistocles

19.

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

20.

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

Lawson, Nigel

21.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

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

24.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

25.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

26.

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

Crockett, Davy

27.

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

Caldwell, John S.

28.

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

Kempton, Murray

29.

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.

30.

The government must always be a step ahead of the popular movement.

Boytzwnburg, Count

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Einstein, Albert

36.

Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.

Igleheart, Austin

37.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

38.

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

Richard M. Nixon

39.

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

Melbourne, Lord

40.

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service]

Herodotus

44.

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

45.

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

Douglas, William O.

46.

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

Updike, John

47.

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