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Quotation of the day
Friday, 21 November 2008
Daily Quote:
"There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American." (Twain, Mark - America)

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Proverb of the Day
All that glitters is not gold.
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Browse Quotations about Government

A government is the only vessel that leaks from the top.
A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.
A Government of the people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.
A man without a vote is man without protection.
All good government must begin at home.
An ambassador is an honest person sent to lie abroad for their country.
An educated people can be easily governed.
Any cook should be able to run the country.
Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.
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.
Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Beaverbrook is so pleased to be in the government that he is like the town tart who finally married the Mayor.
Being nice to governments doesn't work, they are such lying bastards.
Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, then everybody disagrees.
Even to observe neutrality you must have a strong government.
Every country has the government it deserves.
Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principles.
Fear is the foundation of most government.
For Forms of Government let fools contest; whatever is best administered is best.
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.
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.
Generosity is a part of my character, and I therefore hasten to assure this Government that I will never make an allegation of dishonesty against it wherever a simple explanation of stupidity will suffice.
Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Good government is the outcome of private virtue.
Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.
Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.
Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.
Government has no other end, but the preservation of property.
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.
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.
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.
Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
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.
Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.
Governments never learn. Only people learn.
Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.
I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.
I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.
I have no ambition to govern men. It is a painful and thankless office
I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.
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.
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.
If you join government, calmly make your contribution and move on. Don't go along to get along; do your best and when you have to -- and you will -- leave, and be something else.
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.
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.
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.
In the councils of a state, the question is not so much, what ought to be done? As, what can be done?
In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.
It is easy to rule over the good.
It is function of government to invent philosophies to explain the demands of its own convenience.
It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
It is perfectly true that that government is best which governs least. It is equally true that that government is best which provides most.
It is the duty of government to make it difficult for people to do wrong, easy to do right.
It is the duty of the President to propose and it is the privilege of the Congress to dispose.
It is very easy to accuse a government of imperfection, for all mortal things are full of it.
It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.
Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.
Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
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.
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.
My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government.
-- J