Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Government

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

Murray, Bill

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

Remember that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take away everything you have.

Crockett, Davy

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.

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

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

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

Herbert, A. P.

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

Douglas, William O.

10.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

11.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

12.

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

13.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

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.

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

Reston, James

16.

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

Durant, William J.

17.

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

Lawson, Nigel

18.

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.

19.

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

Baxter, Beverley

20.

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

Friedman, Milton

21.

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

22.

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

Kempton, Murray

23.

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

H. L. Mencken

24.

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

Hume, David

25.

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

26.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

27.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

28.

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

29.

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

30.

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

31.

All good government must begin at home.

Haweis, H. R.

32.

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

Welch, Robert

33.

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

Baluch, Joy

34.

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

35.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

41.

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

Fred Thompson

42.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

43.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

44.

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

Friedman, Milton

45.

No more distressing moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to a hard, fast and specific decision.

Tuchman, Barbara

46.

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

47.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

48.

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill

49.

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

50.

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

Truman, Harry S