Motivational Quotes

Government

An educated people can be easily governed.

- Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

Best Quotes about Government

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

Reston, James

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

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

Caldwell, John S.

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

Bob Wells

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

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

Voltaire

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

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

Gardner, John W.

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

Kempton, Murray

10.

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

11.

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.

12.

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

Baluch, Joy

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

17.

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

18.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Updike, John

19.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

21.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

22.

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

23.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

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.

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

Jackson, Andrew

28.

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

Einstein, Albert

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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.

31.

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

Lawson, Nigel

32.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

33.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

34.

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

Fred Thompson

35.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

36.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

37.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

Murray, Bill

40.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Richard M. Nixon

44.

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

Dulles, John Foster

45.

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

Pittacus

46.

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

H. L. Mencken

47.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

48.

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

49.

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

Melbourne, Lord

50.

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