Motivational Quotes

Government

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

- Kennedy, John F.

Best Quotes about Government

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

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

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

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

Reston, James

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

Einstein, Albert

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

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

Kocher, Gerhard

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

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

Bastiat, Frederic

10.

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

Friedman, Milton

11.

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

Welch, Robert

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

15.

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

16.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Hume, David

21.

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

22.

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

Durant, William J.

23.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

24.

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

Boytzwnburg, Count

25.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

26.

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

Burns, George

27.

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

28.

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

29.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

30.

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

31.

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

Murray, Bill

32.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

33.

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

Voltaire

34.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

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

Fred Thompson

37.

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

Updike, John

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Jackson, Andrew

41.

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

Limbaugh, Rush

42.

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

43.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

44.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

45.

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

46.

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

Alcott, Amos Bronson

47.

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

Reagan, Ronald

48.

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

Russell, Bertrand

49.

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.

50.

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

Updike, John