Motivational Quotes

Government

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

- Burns, George

Best Quotes about Government

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

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

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Too bad that all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.

Burns, George

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

Kocher, Gerhard

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Kempton, Murray

10.

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

Reagan, Ronald

11.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

12.

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

Bertrand Russell

13.

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

Richard M. Nixon

14.

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

15.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

16.

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

17.

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

Russell, Bertrand

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

For its part, Government will listen. We will strive to listen in new ways -- to the voices of quiet anguish, to voices that speak without words, the voices of the heart, to the injured voices, and the anxious voices, and the voices that have despaired of being heard.

Nixon, Richard M.

21.

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

Reagan, Ronald

22.

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

Voltaire

23.

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.

24.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

25.

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

Welch, Robert

26.

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

Baluch, Joy

27.

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

28.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

29.

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

Hume, David

30.

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

31.

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

32.

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

Marshalov, Boris

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.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

35.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

36.

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

Updike, John

37.

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

Solon

38.

The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, the government assumes an aspect of wickedness.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

39.

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

40.

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

Durant, William J.

41.

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

Caldwell, John S.

42.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Fred Thompson

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Murray, Bill

46.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Melbourne, Lord

47.

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

Reston, James

48.

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

49.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

50.

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

Herbert, A. P.