• Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.

  

  Thomas Mann

  AuthorGerman1875 · 19th century

  4.9 · 32 votes · 96 reads

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• Some of the Presidents were great and some of them weren't. I can say that, because I wasn't one of the great Presidents, but I had a good time trying to be one, I can tell you that.

  

  Harry S. Truman

  PoliticianAmerican1884 · 19th century

  3.5 · 31 votes · 42 reads

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• That government is best which governs least.

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.6 · 6 votes · 7 reads

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

  

  Thomas Hobbes

  PhilosopherBritish1588 · 16th century

  4.6 · 39 votes · 55 reads

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• The arbitrary rule of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most dangerous and the surest form of seduction: they lull a people imperceptibly into the habit of loving, respecting, and serving his successor, whoever that successo

  

  Denis Diderot

  PhilosopherFrench1713 · 18th century

  3.8 · 50 votes · 32 reads

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

  

  John D. Rockefeller

  BusinessmanAmerican1839 · 19th century

  3.1 · 7 votes · 128 reads

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• 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.

  

  George Bernard Shaw

  WriterIrish1856 · 19th century

  3.5 · 62 votes · 185 reads

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• The basis of effective government if public confidence.

  

  John F. Kennedy

  PoliticianAmerican1917 · 20th century

  5.0 · 64 votes · 18 reads

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

  

  Virginia Woolf

  WriterBritish1882 · 19th century

  4.2 · 62 votes · 125 reads

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

  

  Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

  PoetGerman1749 · 18th century

  5.0 · 5 votes · 140 reads

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• 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.

  

  Jean Jacques Rousseau

  PoliticianSwiss1712 · 18th century

  3.2 · 64 votes · 113 reads

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• The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government.

  

  Thomas Hobbes

  PhilosopherBritish1588 · 16th century

  3.0 · 41 votes · 87 reads

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• The Chinese government attaches importance to, and protects, human rights. We have incorporated these lines into the Chinese constitution, and we also implement the stipulation in real earnest. I think for any government, what is most important is to ensu

  W

  Wen Jiabao

  PoliticianChinese1942 · 20th century

  3.4 · 52 votes · 81 reads

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• The contented and economically comfortable have a very discriminating view of government. Nobody is ever indignant about bailing out failed banks and failed savings and loans associations. But when taxes must be paid for the lower middle class and poor, t

  J

  John Kenneth Galbraith

  EconomistAmerican1908 · 20th century

  4.4 · 31 votes · 138 reads

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

  T

  Terence

  PoetRoman

  4.1 · 18 votes · 191 reads

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• The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine.

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  3.5 · 19 votes · 50 reads

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• The less government we have the better.

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  3.0 · 52 votes · 2 reads

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• The nation's government has just handed me the bill that grants us our civil rights. I am receiving it before you, certain that I am accepting this on behalf of all Argentinean women, and I can feel my hands tremble with joy as they grasp the laurel procl

  E

  Evita Peron

  PoliticianArgentinian1919 · 20th century

  3.7 · 49 votes · 65 reads

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• The new rage is to say that the government is the cause of all our problems, and if only we had no government, we'd have no problems. I can tell you, that contradicts evidence, history, and common sense.

  

  William J. Clinton

  PoliticianAmerican1946 · 20th century

  4.5 · 9 votes · 178 reads

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• The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts.

  

  Abraham Lincoln

  PoliticianAmerican1809 · 19th century

  3.2 · 41 votes · 66 reads

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• The President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters wh

  

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  PoetAmerican1803 · 19th century

  4.8 · 35 votes · 13 reads

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• The president is the representative of the whole nation and he's the only lobbyist that all the one hundred and sixty million people in the country have.

  

  Harry S. Truman

  PoliticianAmerican1884 · 19th century

  3.3 · 26 votes · 157 reads

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• The punishment which the wise suffer who refuse to take part in the government, is to live under the government of worse men.

  

  Pierre Beaumarchais

  PlaywrightFrench1732 · 18th century

  3.9 · 57 votes · 181 reads

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• The real stumbling-block of totalitarian régimes is not the spiritual need of men for freedom of thought; it is men's inability to stand the physical and nervous strain of a permanent state of excitement, except during a few years of their youth.

  

  Simone de Beauvoir

  NovelistFrench1908 · 20th century

  4.0 · 7 votes · 42 reads

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• The task of the government is not only to pour honey into a cup, but sometimes to give bitter medicine.

  

  Vladimir Putin

  PoliticianRussian1952 · 20th century

  3.3 · 64 votes · 21 reads

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• The three great ends which a statesman ought to propose to himself in the government of a nation, are - 1. Security to possessors; 2. Facility to acquirers; and, 3. Hope to all.

  

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  PoetBritish1772 · 18th century

  3.2 · 13 votes · 76 reads

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

  

  Henry Ward Beecher

  PoliticianAmerican1813 · 19th century

  4.4 · 58 votes · 165 reads

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• There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the body. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul. There is the despot who tyrannizes over the soul and body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called the

  

  Oscar Wilde

  PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

  3.8 · 42 votes · 129 reads

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• There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.

  

  Bertrand Russell

  PhilosopherBritish1872 · 19th century

  4.1 · 39 votes · 40 reads

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• This American government - what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instant losing some of its integrity? It has not the vitality and force of a single living man; for a single man c

  

  Henry David Thoreau

  PoetAmerican1817 · 19th century

  4.2 · 48 votes · 165 reads

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• Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasio

  

  Benjamin Franklin

  PoliticianAmerican1706 · 18th century

  4.2 · 29 votes · 140 reads

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• Thou camest out of thy mother's belly without government, thou hast liv'd hitherto without government, and thou mayst be carried to thy long home without government, when it shall please the Lord. How many people in this world live without government, yet

  

  Miguel de Cervantes

  PoetSpanish1547 · 16th century

  4.2 · 60 votes · 140 reads

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• To be President of the United States, sir, is to act as advocate for a blind, venomous, and ungrateful client; still, one must make the best of the case, for the purposes of Providence.

  J

  John Updike

  WriterAmerican1932 · 20th century

  3.0 · 20 votes · 87 reads

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• To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

  

  José Ortega y Gasset

  PhilosopherSpanish1883 · 19th century

  4.2 · 12 votes · 0 reads

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• Under a Presidential government, a nation has, except at the electing moment, no influence; it has not the ballot-box before it; its virtue is gone, and it must wait till its instant of despotism again returns.

  

  Walt Whitman

  PoetAmerican1819 · 19th century

  3.0 · 35 votes · 58 reads

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• We can't have democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government over stuff we've never had a conversation about. We need to know what the parameters are, what kind of surveillance the government is going to do, and how and why.

  

  Larry Page

  BusinessmanAmerican1973 · 20th century

  3.6 · 62 votes · 22 reads

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• We have the best government that money can buy.

  

  Mark Twain

  WriterAmerican1835 · 19th century

  3.6 · 60 votes · 107 reads

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

  

  Thomas Alva Edison

  ScientistAmerican1847 · 19th century

  4.9 · 6 votes · 124 reads

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• We must lead in a different way... We must have an active president, who gives strong direction and works with the government for its implementation.

  

  Lionel Jospin

  PoliticianFrench1937 · 20th century

  3.5 · 47 votes · 16 reads

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• We're a democratic society. Shutting down the government should not be on the agenda.

  

  Alan Greenspan

  EconomistAmerican1926 · 20th century

  4.9 · 22 votes · 61 reads

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• What good fortune for governments that the people do not think.

  

  Adolf Hitler

  PoliticianGerman1889 · 19th century

  3.3 · 27 votes · 102 reads

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• When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President. Now I'm beginning to believe it.

  C

  Clarence S. Darrow

  LawyerAmerican1857 · 19th century

  4.5 · 32 votes · 16 reads

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• When you get to be President, there are all those things, the honors, the twenty-one gun salutes, all those things. You have to remember it isn't for you. It's for the Presidency.

  

  Harry S. Truman

  PoliticianAmerican1884 · 19th century

  4.1 · 50 votes · 65 reads

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• When you're taking the country through difficult times and difficult decisions you've got to take the country with you. That means permanently trying to make the argument that what you're doing is fair and seen to be fair.

  

  David Cameron

  PoliticianBritish1966 · 20th century

  3.0 · 54 votes · 116 reads

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• 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 Hobbes

  PhilosopherBritish1588 · 16th century

  3.8 · 16 votes · 86 reads

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• Whenever you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.

  

  Harry S. Truman

  PoliticianAmerican1884 · 19th century

  4.5 · 56 votes · 15 reads

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• While the State exists there can be no freedom; when there is freedom there will be no State.

  

  Vladimir Lenin

  LeaderRussian1870 · 19th century

  4.2 · 17 votes · 103 reads

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• You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument, and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall into not doing things very well.

  

  Bill Gates

  BusinessmanAmerican1955 · 20th century

  4.2 · 28 votes · 34 reads

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