76 Government Waste Quotes

Following is our list of government waste quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Government Waste Quotes

It is a popular delusion that the government wastes vast amounts of money through inefficiency and sloth. Enormous effort and elaborate planning are required to waste this much money. — P. J. O'Rourke

The vast amount of waste and sheer stupidity in government - from the Pentagon to the Food and Drug Administration - could fill committee agendas for years. — Tom Coburn

The government is so out of control. It is so bloated and infested with fraud and deceit and corruption and abuse of power. — Ted Nugent

This nation can no longer tolerate the autonomous conduct of any single service. A waste of the resources of America in spendthrift defense is an invitation to disaster for America. — Louis A. Johnson

There is no waste in the world that equals the waste from needless, ill-directed, and ineffective motions... — Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them. — Ronald Reagan

Enough is enough. Enough of the waste. Enough of the spending. Enough of the debt. Enough of the arrogance in Washington, D.C. — Dan Benishek

Everything government touches turns to crap. - Ringo Starr

Everything government touches turns to crap. — Ringo Starr

We need to stop spending money we don't have. — Paul Ryan

We cannot afford idleness, waste or inefficiency. — Eamon de Valera

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless. — Milton Friedman

Nothing is easier than spending the public money. It does not appear to belong to anybody. The temptation is overwhelming to bestow it on somebody. — Calvin Coolidge

No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order. — Franklin D. Roosevelt

The government - they're completely useless. — Chamath Palihapitiya

The problem is not that people are taxed too little, the problem is that government spends too much. — Ronald Reagan

Short Government Waste Quotes

  • Write down everything you spend. The waste in your daily spending should soon become apparent. — Edward O. Thorp
  • In government, the scum rises to the top. — Friedrich August von Hayek
  • The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. — Milton Friedman
  • Governments harangue about deficits to get more revenue so they can spend more. — Allan H. Meltzer
  • The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize. — Shigeo Shingo
  • War is just one more big government program. — Joseph Sobran

Government Waste Image Quotes

Government waste quote Don't waste words on people who deserve your silence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say
Don't waste words on people who deserve your silence. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can say is nothing at all.

Waste Disposal Quotes

The linear 'Take - Make - Dispose' system, which depletes natural resources and generates waste, is deeply flawed and can be productively replaced by a restorative model in which waste does not exist as such but is only food for the next cycle — Ellen MacArthur

Campaigns fail if they waste resources courting voters who are unpersuadable or already persuaded. Their most urgent task is to find and persuade the few voters who are genuinely undecided and the larger number who are favorably disposed but need a push to actually vote. — James Surowiecki

We subsidize the disposal of waste in all its myriad forms — from landfills, to Superfund cleanups, to deep-well injection, to storage of nuclear waste. In the process, we encourage an economy where 80 percent of what we consume gets thrown away after one use. — Paul Hawken

Government waste quote Don't waste your time looking back, you're not going that way.
Don't waste your time looking back, you're not going that way.

Obviously, waste disposal is an enormous and fantastic industry. — Felix Dennis

This culture of waste has made us insensitive even to the waste and disposal of food, which is even more despicable when all over the world, unfortunately, many individuals and families are suffering from hunger and malnutrition. — Pope Francis

From my travels around the world I have seen how much damage and pollution is done by the careless disposal of waste. It is also evident that we in the West produce far more and throw away far more than the developing world, almost without thinking — Michael Palin

Government waste quote Never waste your feelings on people who don't value them.
Never waste your feelings on people who don't value them.

Put simply, if we do not redirect our extraction and production systems and change the way we distribute, consume, and dispose of our stuff - what I sometimes call the take-make-waste model - the economy as it is will kill the planet. — Annie Leonard

It's a national concern, I mean how we dispose of nuclear waste in a safe way, how we deal with this incredible amount of nuclear waste we have created over the years. — Tom Udall

Brookfield High School. How may I direct your call? No, sir, this is not a waste- disposal unit, I'm afraid you have the wrong number. — Jaclyn Moriarty

Energy literacy means you can see the waste in disposing of a plastic bottle after you've drunk water from some place on the other side of the world. — Saul Griffith

People Writing About Government Waste

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan
quotes on socialism, freedom and government

1059 19098
Read quotes by Milton Friedman

Milton Friedman
quotes on capitalism, inflation and government

372 3653
Read quotes by P. J. O'Rourke

P. J. O'Rourke
quotes on liberals, politics

962 2251
Read quotes by Tom Coburn

Tom Coburn
quotes on education, government and culture

68 254
Read quotes by Ted Nugent

Ted Nugent
quotes on hunting

174 829
Read quotes by Ringo Starr

Ringo Starr
quotes on friendship, stars and love

132 389

More Government Waste Quotes

A good two years after Hurricane Katrina I remember feeling so devastated and so ignorant that there was so much damage still left. I felt like here I was an American and this is an American city and the government hasn't done enough and people haven't given back enough. Everyone forgot and the city was lying in waste. — AnnaLynne McCord

It is time for conservatives to do what they do best and insist that a wasteful, inefficient government program gets off the books. Small government and the death penalty don't go together. — Christy Clark

Government waste quote If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is
If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.

Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government, reduction in wasteful spending, and respect for human life. — Jay Sekulow

If we can but prevent the government from wasting the labours of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy. — Thomas Jefferson

Any time you find the government involved in a conspiracy to violate the citizenship or the civil rights of a people, then you are wasting your time going to that government expecting redress. Instead, you have to take that government to the World Court and accuse it of genocide and all of the other crimes that it is guilty of today. — Malcolm X

It is war that wastes a nations wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. — George Santayana

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. — H. L. Mencken

You know, in a workplace, when you shrink the size of a workforce, there is pain there. But there is no question: we have a government that we can no longer afford.That is the cold, hard fact. So we have to make this more efficient. We have to sunset programs that no longer work. We have to eliminate waste and fraud. We must do this. — Meg Whitman

All the things I resent most about out-of-control government and the politicians who support it, grow it, or simply fail to deal with it, what angers me above all else is the knowledge that all of this waste and ruin is entirely preventable. — Carly Fiorina

Government sponsors untold waste, criminality and inequality in every sphere of life it touches, giving little or nothing in return. — Doug Casey

In China, I helped introduce UNEP's campaign to reduce food waste on World Environment Day. The government took notice of food waste issues and now, when you over-order in a restaurant, you are encouraged to downsize. This is where people can really impact policy and vice versa! — Li Bingbing

To pay out millions upon millions of dollars in bonuses for incomplete work, poor performance, and unacceptable products is the height of government waste and mismanagement. — Jim Gibbons

I think [Pablo Escobar] wasted an incredibly opportunity which was when he stayed at the prison he made, La Catedral. It was the one chance that the government and the people of Colombia gave him to confess his illicit activities and to remain in one place with very favorable conditions. — Juan Pablo Escobar

The problem with ideology is if you got an ideology, you already got your mind made up, you know all the answers, and that makes evidence irrelevant and argument a waste of time, so you tend to govern by assertion and attack. The problem with that is that discourages thinking and gives you bad results. — William J. Clinton

The key solution is to invest in innovation and entrepreneurship within the company. Reducing waste - although probably not eliminating it - and do so at all levels of government would probably generate the capital needed. Alas, that will probably not happen because it makes too much sense. — Philip Kotler

Like all good citizens, the elderly and people with disabilities want to eradicate waste and fraud from government, but helping people with special needs meet their basic needs doesn’t fit this description. — Joni Eareckson Tada

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy. — Chris Chocola

The consequences of inflation are malinvestment, waste, a wanton redistribution of wealth and income, the growth of speculation and gambling, immorality and corruption, disillusionment, social resentment, discontent, upheaval and riots, bankruptcy, increased government controls, and eventual collapse. — Henry Hazlitt

I get so ticked off at you intellectually lazy people who think that the government is God, that every dollar they get or spend is somehow sacred. There is more fraud and waste and misuse. If the federal government were held accountable to the law as corporations are held accountable, half the federal government would be in prison. — Rush Limbaugh

People are tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers, and they are angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who think all of mankind's problems can be solved by throwing the taxpayers dollars at them. — Ronald Reagan

I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater. — Milton Friedman

The Gillard government must give up its addiction to wasteful spending borrowing and taxing. — Julie Bishop

We have been getting ready to recycle more e-waste by investing in infrastructure, providing grants to local government and working with industry. — Jay Weatherill

Nothing is worse, or more of a breach of the social contract between citizen and state, than for government officials, bureaucrats and agencies to waste the money entrusted to them by the people they serve. — Bob Riley

A government decision that slashes spending at the wrong time and sends a weak economy into a tailspin can be just as undisciplined as one that unleashes a wasteful spending spree in an overheated environment. — Peter Blair Henry

It must be a conviction Government. As Prime Minister I could not waste time having internal arguments. — Margaret Thatcher

The growing role that the government has played in financing and administering schooling has led not only the enormous waste of taxpayers money but also to a far poorer educational system. — Milton Friedman

Under our scheme of government the waste of public money is a crime against the citizen. — Grover Cleveland

Government spending either is completely wasteful, merely transfers income, purchases an intermediate rather than a final good, or purchases valuable final services whose value cannot be ascertained because the transaction is not made by private parties exchanging their own resources in a market setting. — Robert Higgs

The experience of every-day life fully proves that the armed individual is invariably anxious to try his strength. The same is historically true of governments. Really peaceful countries do not waste life and energy in war preparations, with the result that peace is maintained. — Emma Goldman

Government-to-government foreign aid promotes statism, centralized planning, socialism, dependence, pauperization, inefficiency, and waste. It prolongs the poverty it is designed to cure. Voluntary private investment in private enterprise, on the other hand, promotes capitalism, production, independence, and self-reliance. — Henry Hazlitt

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments. — Geoff Mulgan

Anyone who's ever filed a tax return or visited the Department of Motor Vehicles understands that government does two things well: spend our money and waste our time. — Edwin Feulner

I believe in infrastructure, I believe in investing in your hard assets. Where I think government starts to fail is when it starts getting itself weighed down with the social programs. And I think the American public just feels like a lot of that money is tossed aside and wasted. — Mick Cornett

Many governments are giving subsidies to fossil fuel production and consumption that encourage greenhouse gas emissions, at the same time as they are spending on projects to promote clean energy. This is a wasteful use of scarce budget resources. — Jose Angel Gurria

I say a vote for the Democrats or Republicans is the ONLY wasted vote.... By buying into the rhetoric that there are only two parties worth voting for...you increase their power. And with it, you promote the watered-down freedoms and endless government growth that these two parties consisently vote for. — Carla Howell

What chiefly governs the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump is the receptacle for the refuse of a city. — Walter Karp

I favor the policy of economy, not because I wish to save money, but because I wish to save people. The men and women of this country who toil are the ones who bear the cost of the Government. Every dollar that we carelessly waste means that their life will be so much the more meager. Every dollar that we prudently save means that their life will be so much the more abundant. Economy is idealism in its most practical form. — Calvin Coolidge

If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy. — Thomas Jefferson

In the last few decades entire new categories of waste have come to plague and menace the American scene. Pollution is growing at a rapid rate. Pollution destroys beauty and menaces health. It cuts down on efficiency, reduces property values and raises taxes. Almost all these wastes and pollutions are the result of activities carried on for the benefit of man. A prime national goal must be an environment that is pleasing to the senses and healthy to live in. Our Government is already doing much in this field. We have made significant progress. But more must be done. — Lyndon B. Johnson

Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government. Public servants at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens; and the same circumstance, by rendering detection impossible to their constituents, will invite public agents to corruption, plunder and waste. — Thomas Jefferson

Every effort needs to be made to try and offset the costs of Katrina and Rita by reductions in other government programs, especially those that are wasteful, duplicative and ineffective. — Ben Bernanke

I am honored that my freshman class colleagues have put their trust in me to represent our historic class at the leadership table. The incoming freshman class of Representatives is large and diverse but we share many common goals including cutting wasteful spending, getting our economy back on track and making government smarter and more efficient. — Kristi Noem

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