Government Quotes

Government, is the last analysis, is organized opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion, there is likely to be bad government.

MacKenzie King

When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

Harry S Truman

All in all, I am not surprised that the people who want to unravel the social contract start with young adults. Those who are urged to feel afraid, very afraid, have both the greatest sense of independence and the most finely honed skepticism about government.

Ellen Goodman

If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

Frank Herbert, The Dosadi Experiment

The 1976 Bicentennial is not going to be invented in Washington, printed in triplicate by the Government Printing Office and mailed to you by the United States Postal Service.

Richard Milhous Nixon

Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

George Washington

Our constitution works. Our great republic is a government of laws, not of men.

Gerald R. Ford, on becoming President, Aug. 9, 1974

The one bonus of not lifting the ban on gays in the military is that the next time the government mandates a draft, we can all declare we are homosexual instead of running off to Canada.

Lorne Bloch

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.

Thomas Jefferson

Asking to meet with Italian businessmen instead of government officials. I want to talk to these people because they stay in power and you change all the time.

Nikita Khrushchev

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

What experience and history teach is this - That nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

We know that dictators are quick to choose aggression, while free nations strive to resolve differences in peace. We know that oppressive governments support terror, while free governments fight the terrorists in their midst. We know that free peoples embrace progress and life, instead of becoming the recruits for murderous ideologies.

George W. Bush, Speech to UN General Assembly, September 21, 2004

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

Frederick Bastiat, "Government" published in 1848

All the taxes paid over a lifetime by the average American are spent by the government in less than a second.

Jim Fiebig

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

Francis Bacon

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

John Adams

Religion... is the basis and foundation of government... before any man can be considered as a member of civil society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governor of the Universe.

James Madison

Democracy is a form of government in which it is permitted to wonder aloud what the country could do under first - Class management.

Senator Soape

The best government rests on the people, and not on the few, on persons and not on property, on the free development of public opinion and not on authority.

George Bancroft

The real question of government versus private enterprise is argued on too philosophical and abstract a basis. Theoretically, planning may be good. But nobody has ever figured out the cause of government stupidity and until they do and find the cure all ideal plans will fall into quicksand.

Richard Feynman

It was once said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Hubert Humphrey

Its embarrassing, you try to overthrow the government and you wind up on a Best Sellers List.

Abbie Hoffman, In response to the success of his book; Steal this Book

So long as governments set the example of killing their enemies, private citizens will occasionally kill their. s.

Elbert Hubbard

If government could create jobs and raise children, socialism would have worked.

George Gilde

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Nadia Boulange

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

Adlai E. Stevenson Jr.

The Soviet government is the most realistic regime in the world - No ideals.

Golda Mei

Besides anarchy, the worst thing in this world is government.

Henry Ward Beeche

Government cannot make us equal it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law.

Clarence Thomas

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

John Updike

Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.

H. L. Mencken

I wish the government would put a tax on pianos for the incompetent.

Dame Edith Sitwell

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.

Thomas Jefferson

Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth.

Abraham Lincoln

I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau

Good government generally begins in the family, and if the moral character of a people once degenerate, their political character must soon follow.

Elias Boudinot