Motivational Quotes

Government

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.

- Mirabeau, Comte De

Best Quotes about Government

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

Lawson, Nigel

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

Dulles, John Foster

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

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

Cousin, Victor

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

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

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

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

Bastiat, Frederic

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

Murray, Bill

10.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

11.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Johnson, Samuel

13.

Safety of the state is the highest law.

Justinian

14.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

15.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

16.

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

17.

A man without a vote is man without protection.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

18.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

19.

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

Crockett, Davy

20.

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

Gardner, John W.

21.

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.

Hospers, John

22.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

23.

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

24.

It is easy to rule over the good.

Plautus, Titus Maccius

25.

What we should be asking is not whether we need a big government or small government, but how we can create a smarter and better government.

President Barack Obama

26.

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

Fred Thompson

27.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

28.

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.

29.

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

Hume, David

30.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

31.

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

Douglas, William O.

32.

Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government.

Thoreau, Henry David

33.

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

Durant, William J.

34.

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

Kempton, Murray

35.

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

36.

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

37.

You know what's interesting about Washington? It's the kind of place where second-guessing has become second nature.

George W. Bush

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Updike, John

41.

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

Welch, Robert

42.

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

43.

Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

44.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

45.

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

Bunting, Basil

46.

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

Marshalov, Boris

47.

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

Herbert, A. P.

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.

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

50.

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