Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Bastiat, Frederic

Best Quotes about Government

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.

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

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

Baxter, Beverley

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

Voltaire

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

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

Proverb, French

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

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

Truman, Harry S

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

10.

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

Douglas, William O.

11.

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

12.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

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

14.

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

Einstein, Albert

15.

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

Marshalov, Boris

16.

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

17.

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

Durant, William J.

18.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

20.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

21.

You can only govern men by serving them. The rule is without exception.

Cousin, Victor

22.

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

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.

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

25.

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

Friedman, Milton

26.

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

27.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Hume, David

32.

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

Caldwell, John S.

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

36.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

37.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

41.

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

42.

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

Friedman, Milton

43.

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

Jackson, Andrew

44.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Richard M. Nixon

49.

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

Reagan, Ronald

50.

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

Pittacus