Government Quotes

It seems to me that government is like a pump and what it pumps up is just what we are a fair sample of the intellect the ethics and the morals of the people no better no worse.

Adlai Stevenson

Themistocles said "The Athenians govern the Greeks I govern the Athenians you my wife govern me your son governs you."

Plutarch

The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government.

George Washington

No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

Abraham Lincoln

When I am abroad I always make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home.

Winston Churchill

The people's right to change what does not work is one of the greatest principles of our system of government.

No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.

J. K. Galbraith

The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast but never sinks.

Everett Dirksen

The supply of government exceeds the demand.

Lewis H. Lapham

Tyranny is yielding to the lust of governing.

The safety of the State is the highest law.

Justinian

Experience teaches us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

Government is a trust and the officers of the government are trustees and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people.

Though the people support the government the government should not support the people.

Grover Cleveland

I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.

Thomas Jefferson

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

Thomas Jefferson

Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish. (Don't overdo it.)

Lao-Tsze

A house divided against itself cannot stand - I believe this government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free.

Abraham Lincoln

Every nation has the government that it deserves.

Joseph de Maistre

Democracy is direct self-government over all the people for all the people by all the people.

Theodore Parker

Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection - they have many friends and few enemies.

Wendell Phillips

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned even the meanest yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades - that of government.

Socrates

The art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs.

Napoléon Bonaparte

The worst thing in this world next to anarchy is government.

Henry Ward Beecher

The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done but cannot do at all or cannot so well do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities.

Abraham Lincoln

That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves.

Thomas Jefferson

How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?

Charles de Gaulle

There is but one way for a president to deal with the Congress and that is continuously incessantly and without interruption. If it's really going to work the relationship between the president and the Congress has got to be almost incestuous.

Lyndon B. Johnson

The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.

Henry Kissinger

The average man that I encounter all over the country regards government as a sort of great milk cow with its head in the clouds eating air and growing a full teat for everybody on earth.

Clarence C. Manion

To make certain that crime does not pay the government should take it over and try to run it.

G. Norman Collie

The strongest pressure in the world can be friendly pressure.

The art of putting the right men in the right places is first in the science of government but that of finding places for the discontented is the most difficult.

It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails admit it frankly and try another but above all try something.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The government is becoming the family of last resort.

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days nor in the life of this administration nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet.

Governments last as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed.

Bernard Berenson

The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbour.

Hubert Humphrey

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

When we got into office the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.

Benjamin Disraeli

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.

Abraham Lincoln

Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.

A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.

Barry Goldwater

Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium of custom of inertia it is by no means a representative of reason.

George Santayana

The best reason why monarchy is a strong government is that it is an intelligible government: the mass of mankind understand it and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.

Friedrich von Schiller

Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?

Abraham Lincoln

As I get older ... I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government.

Every man wishes to pursue his occupation and to enjoy the fruits of his labours and the produce of his property in peace and safety and with the least possible expense. When these things are accomplished all the objects for which government ought to be established are answered.

Thomas Jefferson

A monarchy is a merchantman which sails well but will sometimes strike on a rock and go to the bottom whilst a republic is a raft which will never sink but then your feet are always in water.

The state it cannot too often be repeated does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.

Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil in its worst state an intolerable one.

Government is not reason it is not eloquence - it is force.

George Washington

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

Honoré de Balzac

Whenever by an unfortunate occurrence of circumstances an opposition is compelled to support the government the support should be given with a kick and not a caress and should be withdrawn at the first available moment.

Randolph Churchill

To govern is to choose.

Pierre Mendes-France

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Republics are brought to their ends by luxury monarchies by poverty.

Baron de Montesquieu

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