Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Government

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

Hospers, John

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

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

Dulles, John Foster

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Themistocles

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

Bertrand Russell

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

The point to remember is what government gives it must first take away

Caldwell, John S.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

10.

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

11.

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

Burns, George

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Crockett, Davy

18.

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

19.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.

Churchill, Winston

20.

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

Welch, Robert

21.

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill

22.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

23.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

24.

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

Bob Wells

25.

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

26.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

27.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

28.

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

29.

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

Solon

30.

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

Gardner, John W.

31.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

32.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

33.

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

34.

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

Voltaire

35.

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

36.

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

Reagan, Ronald

37.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

38.

In a healthy nation there is a kind of dramatic balance between the will of the people and the government, which prevents its degeneration into tyranny.

Einstein, Albert

39.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

40.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

41.

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

Pittacus

42.

The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.

Beecher, Henry Ward

43.

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

44.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

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.

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

47.

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

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.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

50.

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

Herbert, A. P.