Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Solon

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

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.

Mirabeau, Comte De

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

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

Updike, John

The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.

Voltaire

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

10.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

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

Bob Wells

12.

Sade, Marquis De

13.

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

Hume, David

14.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

15.

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

Gladstone, William E.

16.

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

Bunting, Basil

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Herbert, A. P.

21.

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

22.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

23.

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

Kempton, Murray

24.

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

25.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

26.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

27.

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

Lawson, Nigel

28.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

29.

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

Reston, James

30.

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

Voltaire

31.

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

Reagan, Ronald

32.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

33.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

35.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

36.

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

Welch, Robert

37.

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

38.

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

Pittacus

39.

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

Hospers, John

40.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

41.

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

Reagan, Ronald

42.

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

43.

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

Gardner, John W.

44.

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

45.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

46.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

47.

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

Richard M. Nixon

48.

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.

49.

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

Baxter, Beverley

50.

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