Motivational Quotes

Government

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

Best Quotes about Government

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

H. L. Mencken

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Dulles, John Foster

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

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

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

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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

Pittacus

10.

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

Einstein, Albert

11.

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

12.

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

Murray, Bill

13.

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

14.

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

Marshalov, Boris

15.

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

Bob Wells

16.

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

Voltaire

17.

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

Bunting, Basil

18.

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

19.

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

Herbert, A. P.

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Any government is potentially the worst client in the world you could ever possibly want to have.

Thomas Heatherwick

23.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

24.

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

Jackson, Andrew

25.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

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.

27.

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

Hume, David

28.

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

29.

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

Gladstone, William E.

30.

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

31.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

32.

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

Amsterdam, Maury

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

36.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

Lawson, Nigel

38.

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