Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

Herbert, A. P.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.

President Barack Obama

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

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.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

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

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.

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

11.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

12.

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

13.

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

14.

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

Bunting, Basil

15.

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

Voltaire

16.

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

Russell, Bertrand

17.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

18.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

19.

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

20.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

21.

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

Wallis, W. Allen

22.

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

23.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

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

25.

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

Dulles, John Foster

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.

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

Truman, Harry S

28.

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

29.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

30.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Durant, William J.

34.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

35.

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

36.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

37.

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

Friedman, Milton

38.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

39.

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

Voltaire

40.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Shaw, George Bernard

41.

Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.

Einstein, Albert

42.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

43.

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

Hume, David

44.

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

45.

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

Douglas, William O.

46.

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

Reagan, Ronald

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Murray, Bill

50.

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