Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

What we should be asking is not whether we need a big government or small government, but how we can create a smarter and better government.

President Barack Obama

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

Gardner, John W.

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

Bertrand Russell

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

That government is the strongest of which every man feels himself a part.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Friedman, Milton

10.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

11.

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.

12.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

13.

In our consumer confidence surveys, we ask people whether they think government economic policy is good, fair, or poor. Increasingly, the answer we get is just plain laughter.

Schmiedeskamp, Jay

14.

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

15.

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

Gladstone, William E.

16.

When any government, or church for that matter, undertakes to say to it's subjects,this you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motive.

Heinlein, Robert

17.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

18.

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

Baxter, Beverley

19.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

21.

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

Voltaire

22.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

25.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

26.

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

Friedman, Milton

27.

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

28.

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

29.

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

Burns, George

30.

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

Jackson, Andrew

31.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

32.

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

33.

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

Welch, Robert

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

39.

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

Douglas, William O.

40.

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

Kempton, Murray

41.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

42.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

43.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

44.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

45.

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.

46.

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

47.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

48.

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

Solon

49.

Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.

Baluch, Joy

50.

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