Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Jackson, Andrew

Best Quotes about Government

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

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

Caldwell, John S.

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

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

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

H. L. Mencken

10.

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

11.

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

Cousin, Victor

12.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

14.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

15.

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

Friedman, Milton

16.

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

Marshalov, Boris

17.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

18.

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

19.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

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

Solon

21.

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

Bob Wells

22.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

23.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

24.

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

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

Durant, William J.

26.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

27.

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

Welch, Robert

28.

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

Gardner, John W.

29.

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

30.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

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

32.

I say to myself that I mustn't let myself be cut off in there, and yet the moment I enter my bag is taken out of my hand, I'm pushed in, shepherded, nursed and above all cut off, alone. Whitehall envelops me.

Crossman, Richard

33.

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

34.

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

Richard M. Nixon

35.

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

36.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

37.

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

Douglas, William O.

38.

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

Voltaire

39.

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

40.

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

Kempton, Murray

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

44.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

45.

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

Wotton, Sir Henry

46.

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

Proverb, French

47.

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

48.

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

Friedman, Milton

49.

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

50.

Government is not reason and it is not eloquence. It is force! Like fire it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

Washington, George