Motivational Quotes

Government

Truth is the glue that holds government together.

- Ford, Gerald R.

Best Quotes about Government

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

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.

Limbaugh, Rush

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

George W. Bush

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Updike, John

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

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

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

10.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

11.

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

Reston, James

12.

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

Welch, Robert

13.

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

14.

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

Friedman, Milton

15.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

16.

The government can destroy wealth but it cannot create wealth, which is the product of labor and management working with creation.

Murray, Bill

17.

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

18.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

19.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

20.

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

21.

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

Rostand, Jean

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Proverb, French

25.

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

Crockett, Davy

26.

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

27.

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

Douglas, William O.

28.

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

Kempton, Murray

29.

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

Mirabeau, Comte De

30.

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

Hospers, John

31.

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

32.

Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.

Durant, William J.

33.

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

Truman, Harry S

34.

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

Marshalov, Boris

35.

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

36.

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

Bunting, Basil

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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.

42.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

43.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

44.

It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

48.

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

49.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

50.

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