Motivational Quotes

Government

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

- Voltaire

Best Quotes about Government

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

Any cook should be able to run the country.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

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

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

Wallis, W. Allen

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

Kocher, Gerhard

The auditor is a watchdog and not a bloodhound.

Topes, Lord Justice

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

Jackson, Andrew

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

10.

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

Gladstone, William E.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Our Congress is the finest body of men money can buy.

Amsterdam, Maury

14.

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

15.

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

Welch, Robert

16.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Roosevelt, Theodore

17.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

18.

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

19.

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

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

Updike, John

22.

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

Macaulay, Thomas B.

23.

Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.

Hamilton, Alexander

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Fear is the foundation of most government.

Adams, John

28.

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

29.

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

Voltaire

30.

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

31.

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

Friedman, Milton

32.

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

Bastiat, Frederic

33.

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

34.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Balzac, Honore De

35.

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.

36.

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

Caldwell, John S.

37.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Shaw, George Bernard

38.

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

Marshalov, Boris

39.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

40.

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

41.

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

Hume, David

42.

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

Reston, James

43.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

44.

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.

Reston, James

45.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

46.

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

Gardner, John W.

47.

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

48.

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

Douglas, William O.

49.

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

Reagan, Ronald

50.

The monarchy is a labor intensive industry.

Wilson, Harold