Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Themistocles

Best Quotes about Government

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

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

Themistocles

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

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

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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.

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

Proverb, French

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

Limbaugh, Rush

10.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

11.

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

Einstein, Albert

12.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

13.

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

Lawson, Nigel

14.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

15.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

16.

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

17.

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

Hospers, John

18.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

19.

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

Pittacus

20.

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

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

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

Burns, George

23.

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

24.

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

Updike, John

25.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

26.

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

Reston, James

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Fred Thompson

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

33.

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

Murray, Bill

34.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

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

Marshalov, Boris

36.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

37.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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.

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

41.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

42.

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

43.

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

Gladstone, William E.

44.

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

Baxter, Beverley

45.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

46.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

47.

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

Dulles, John Foster

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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