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

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

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

Themistocles

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

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

Rostand, Jean

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

H. L. Mencken

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Solon

10.

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

11.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

12.

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

13.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

14.

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

15.

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

16.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

17.

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

18.

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

Gardner, John W.

19.

Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Washington, George

20.

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

Updike, John

21.

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

Bob Wells

22.

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

Douglas, William O.

23.

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

Reagan, Ronald

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Richard M. Nixon

27.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

28.

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

29.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

30.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

32.

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

Reston, James

33.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

34.

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

Herbert, A. P.

35.

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.

Wallis, W. Allen

36.

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

37.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

38.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

39.

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

Lawson, Nigel

40.

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

Burns, George

41.

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

42.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

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

Gladstone, William E.

44.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

45.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

46.

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

Jackson, Andrew

47.

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

48.

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

Updike, John

49.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

50.

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

Reston, James