Motivational Quotes

Government

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

- Melbourne, Lord

Best Quotes about Government

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

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

Jefferson, Thomas

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

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

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

Russell, Bertrand

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

Murray, Bill

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

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

10.

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

11.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

12.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

Bunting, Basil

14.

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

Reagan, Ronald

15.

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

16.

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

17.

The basis of effective government is public confidence.

Kennedy, John F.

18.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

19.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

20.

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

Herbert, A. P.

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

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

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

Douglas, William O.

25.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

26.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

27.

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

H. L. Mencken

28.

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

Bertrand Russell

29.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

30.

Today, if you invent a better mousetrap, the government comes along with a better mouse.

Reagan, Ronald

31.

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

32.

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

Proverb, French

33.

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

Marshalov, Boris

34.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

35.

Of the best rulers, The people only know that they exist; the next best they love and praise the next they fear; and the next they revile. When they do not command the people's faith, some will lose faith in them, and then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, the people all remark, We have done it ourselves.

Lao-Tzu

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.

Wallis, W. Allen

43.

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

44.

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

Gladstone, William E.

45.

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

Thomas Heatherwick

46.

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

Cousin, Victor

47.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

48.

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

49.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

William H. Borah

50.

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