Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

Welch, Robert

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

Friedman, Milton

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

Kempton, Murray

There are no necessary evils in government. Its evils exist only in its abuses.

Jackson, Andrew

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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

Kocher, Gerhard

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

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

10.

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

Marshalov, Boris

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

13.

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

Rostand, Jean

14.

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

Gladstone, William E.

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.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

17.

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

18.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

19.

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

Bob Wells

20.

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

Cousin, Victor

21.

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

Reagan, Ronald

22.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

23.

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

24.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

25.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

26.

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

27.

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

H. L. Mencken

28.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

29.

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

Reston, James

30.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

31.

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

Pittacus

32.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Tuchman, Barbara

33.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

34.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

35.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

39.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

42.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

43.

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

Friedman, Milton

44.

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

45.

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.

46.

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

Bunting, Basil

47.

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

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.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

Bertrand Russell

50.

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