Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Government

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

Hume, David

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

Marshalov, Boris

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

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

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

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

Douglas, William O.

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

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

Reston, James

The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

Jefferson, Thomas

10.

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

Gladstone, William E.

11.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

12.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

13.

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

Bob Wells

14.

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

Friedman, Milton

15.

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

Reston, James

16.

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

Truman, Harry S

17.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

18.

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

19.

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

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.

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

Proverb, French

22.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

23.

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

Russell, Bertrand

24.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

28.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

29.

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

Murray, Bill

30.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

31.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

32.

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

Gardner, John W.

33.

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

Jackson, Andrew

34.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

35.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

36.

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

37.

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

38.

My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.

Jefferson, Thomas

39.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

40.

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

Reagan, Ronald

41.

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

42.

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

43.

An ambassador is an honest person sent to lie abroad for their country.

Wotton, Sir Henry

44.

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

45.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Richard M. Nixon

46.

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

Rostand, Jean

47.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

48.

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

Welch, Robert

49.

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

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon