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Government and Rule QuotesFamous Government and Rule quotes by popular authors such as Abraham Lincoln, William Ralph Inge, George Bernard Shaw, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Woodrow Wilson and others.
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[highlight-text]To govern is to choose.
Pierre Mendes-France
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[highlight-text]Any fool can make a rule.
Henry David Thoreau
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[highlight-text]Big Brother is watching you.
George Orwell
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[highlight-text]Laws go where dollars please.
Portuguese Proverb
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[highlight-text]A difficulty for every solution.
Herbert Samuel
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[highlight-text]The king reigns but does not govern.
Jan Zamoyski
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[highlight-text]What you cannot enforce do not command.
Socrates
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[highlight-text]The supply of government exceeds the demand.
Lewis H. Lapham
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[highlight-text]Tyranny is yielding to the lust of governing.
Lord Moulton
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[highlight-text]Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
Charles Peguy
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[highlight-text]Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore de Balzac
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[highlight-text]The government is becoming the family of last resort.
Jerry Brown
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[highlight-text]The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
George Bernard Shaw
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[highlight-text]Power over a man's subsistence is power over his will.
Alexander Hamilton
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[highlight-text]The world is ruled only by consideration of advantages.
J. C. F. von Schiller
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[highlight-text]Parliament is the longest running farce in the West End.
Cyril Smith
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[highlight-text]The foremost art of kings is the power to endure hatred.
Seneca
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[highlight-text]Government is not reason it is not eloquence - it is force.
George Washington
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[highlight-text]The worst thing in this world next to anarchy is government.
Henry Ward Beecher
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[highlight-text]There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
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[highlight-text]The strongest pressure in the world can be friendly pressure.
Lester Pearson
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[highlight-text]The State that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.
V. S. Pritchett
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[highlight-text]The enemies of Freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
William Ralph Inge
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[highlight-text]Doing what's right isn't the problem. It's knowing what's right.
Lyndon B. Johnson
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[highlight-text]No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition.
Benjamin Disraeli
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[highlight-text]Wherever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship.
Harry S. Truman
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[highlight-text]Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for.
Will Rogers
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[highlight-text]For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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[highlight-text]Republics are brought to their ends by luxury; monarchies by poverty.
Charles de Montesquieu
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[highlight-text]Bureaucracy the rule of no one has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary McCarthy
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[highlight-text]The art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs.
Napoleon Bonaparte
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[highlight-text]The weak have one weapon: the errors of those who think they are strong.
Georges Bidault
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[highlight-text]No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]It is the duty of Her Majesty's Government neither to flap nor to falter.
Harold Macmillan
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[highlight-text]Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.
I. F. Stone
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[highlight-text]The more the world is specialized the more it will be run by generalists.
Marcel Masse
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[highlight-text]Egypt: Where the Israelites would still be if Moses had been a bureaucrat.
Laurence J. Peter
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[highlight-text]Inflation is one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.
Milton Friedman
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[highlight-text]The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
Henry Kissinger
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[highlight-text]The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast but never sinks.
Everett M. Dirksen
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[highlight-text]No man should be in public office who can't make more money in private life.
Thomas E. Dewey
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[highlight-text]We are under a Constitution but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.
Charles Evans Hughes
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[highlight-text]One can present people with opportunities. One cannot make them equal to them.
Rosamond Lehmann
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[highlight-text]States like men have their growth their manhood their decrepitude their decay.
Walter Savage Landor
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[highlight-text]The entire civil service is like a fortress made of papers forms and red tape.
Alexander Ostrovsky
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[highlight-text]The point to remember is that what the Government gives it must first take away.
John S. Caldwell
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[highlight-text]How can you govern a country with two hundred and forty-six varieties of cheese?
Charles de Gaulle
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[highlight-text]A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard Shaw
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[highlight-text]The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination.
Voltaire
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[highlight-text]The impersonal hand of government can never replace the helping hand of a neighbour.
Hubert H. Humphrey
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[highlight-text]No intelligence system can predict what a government will do if it doesn't know itself.
John Kenneth Galbraith
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[highlight-text]Bureaucrats are the only people in the world who can say absolutely nothing and mean it.
Hugh Sidey
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[highlight-text]China has no income tax no unemployed and not a single soldier outside its own territory.
Chou En-lai
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[highlight-text]That government is best which governs the least because its people discipline themselves.
Thomas Jefferson
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[highlight-text]Governments last as long as the under-taxed can defend themselves against the over-taxed.
Bernard Berenson
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[highlight-text]A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
Barry Goldwater
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[highlight-text]A good government remains the greatest of human blessings and no nation has ever enjoyed it.
William Ralph Inge
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[highlight-text]To make certain that crime does not pay the government should take it over and try to run it.
G. Norman Collie
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[highlight-text]I believe the greatest asset a Head of State can have is the ability to get a good night's sleep.
Harold Wilson
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[highlight-text]Government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.
Thomas Paine
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[highlight-text]In the long run every government is the exact symbol of its people with their wisdom and unwisdom.
Thomas Carlyle
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[highlight-text]Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxicabs and cutting hair.
George Burns
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[highlight-text]It would be desirable if every government when it comes to power should have its old speeches burnt.
Philip Snowden
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[highlight-text]It is the aim of good government to stimulate production of bad government to encourage consumption.
Jean Baptiste Say
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[highlight-text]Man's capacity for evil makes democracy necessary and man's capacity for good makes democracy possible.
Reinhold Niebuhr
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[highlight-text]As I get older ... I become more convinced that good government is not a substitute for self-government.
Dwight Morrow
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[highlight-text]The people's right to change what does not work is one of the greatest principles of our system of government.
Richard Nixon
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[highlight-text]The state it cannot too often be repeated does nothing and can give nothing which it does not take from somebody.
Henry George
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[highlight-text]In the Conservative view you have 10 premiers and the Prime Minister as a kind of head waiter to take their orders.
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
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[highlight-text]Government is the only institution that can take a valuable commodity like paper and make it worthless by applying ink.
Ludwig van Moses
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[highlight-text]Must a government of necessity be too strong for the liberties of its people or too weak to maintain its own existence?
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
William Ralph Inge
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[highlight-text]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 Delano Roosevelt
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[highlight-text]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.
John F. Kennedy
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[highlight-text]When the freedom they wished for most was the freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free and never was free again.
Edith Hamilton
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[highlight-text]I would rather be governed by the first three hundred names in the Boston telephone book than by the Faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley
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[highlight-text]The road to democracy is not a freeway. It is a toll road on which we pay by accepting and carrying out our civic responsibilities.
Lucius D. Clay
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[highlight-text]The majority is the best way because it is visible and has strength to make itself obeyed. Yet it is the opinion of the least able.
Blaise Pascal
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[highlight-text]Government is the political representative of a natural equilibrium of custom of inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason.
George Santayana
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[highlight-text]No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States but I never saw the Government of the United States.
Woodrow Wilson
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[highlight-text]We have a tried and tested system of government that in being so flexible exists as a great ghost that no one has dared to conjure into flesh.
J. M. Parkin
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]Something as curious as the monarchy won't survive unless you take account of people's attitudes. After all if people don't want it they won't have it.
Prince Charles
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[highlight-text]Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed and are right.
Henry Mencken
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[highlight-text]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.
Talleyrand
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[highlight-text]While the people retain their virtue and vigilence no administration by any extreme of wickedness or folly can very seriously injure the government in the short space of four years.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]A friend of mine says that every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells and when I give a man an office I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.
Woodrow Wilson
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[highlight-text]Government in the last analysis is organised opinion. Where there is little or no public opinion there is likely to be bad government which sooner or later becomes autocratic government.
William Lyon Mackenzie King
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[highlight-text]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.
Walter Bagehot
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]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.
Fisher Ames
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[highlight-text]At certain times of grave national stress when that rag-bag called the British Constitution is in grave danger of coming unstuck thank heaven for the big safety-pin at the top that keeps it together.
Anonymous
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[highlight-text]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.
John F. Kennedy
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]Any people anywhere being inclined and having the power have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government and form a new one. This is a most valuable and sacred right - a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world.
Abraham Lincoln
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]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
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[highlight-text]The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the crown. It may be frail - its roof may shake - the wind may blow through it - the storm may enter - the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter! - all his force dares not cross the threshhold of the ruined tenement!
William Pitt the Elder