Motivational Quotes

Government

Safety of the state is the highest law.

- Justinian

Best Quotes about Government

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

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

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

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

Solon

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

Kocher, Gerhard

What is government itself but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.

Madison, James

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

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

10.

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

Rostand, Jean

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

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

Proverb, French

13.

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

Voltaire

14.

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

Gardner, John W.

15.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

16.

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.

17.

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

H. L. Mencken

18.

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

Ford, Gerald R.

19.

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

Bertrand Russell

20.

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

Updike, John

21.

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

22.

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

Baluch, Joy

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Caldwell, John S.

26.

Any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have.

Thomas Heatherwick

27.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Hume, David

28.

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

Gladstone, William E.

29.

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

Reston, James

30.

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

Douglas, William O.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Jackson, Andrew

35.

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

36.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

37.

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

38.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

39.

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

Friedman, Milton

40.

Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Dulles, John Foster

42.

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

43.

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

Russell, Bertrand

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Bob Wells

48.

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

Bunting, Basil

49.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

50.

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