Motivational Quotes

Government

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

- Shaw, George Bernard

Best Quotes about Government

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

Herbert, A. P.

If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

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

Crockett, Davy

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

Updike, John

10.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

11.

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

12.

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

Updike, John

13.

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

Burns, George

14.

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

Welch, Robert

15.

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

Truman, Harry S

16.

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

17.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

21.

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

22.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Friedman, Milton

24.

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

25.

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

26.

A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.

Alcott, Amos Bronson

27.

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

Einstein, Albert

28.

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

Reagan, Ronald

29.

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

Kempton, Murray

30.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

31.

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

Friedman, Milton

32.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

33.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

34.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

35.

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

Melbourne, Lord

36.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

37.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

38.

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

39.

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

Dulles, John Foster

40.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

William H. Borah

41.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

42.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

43.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

44.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

Douglas, William O.

49.

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

Voltaire

50.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.