It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.

The remark draws a sharp distinction between people who are internally governed (by conscience, habit, or shared norms) and those who are not. “Good people” require little external control because they self-regulate; social order for them is mostly a matter of light coordination. “Bad people,” by contrast, are depicted as resistant to rule itself—either because they reject moral constraint or because coercion only changes their tactics, not their nature. The line’s bleak humor (“Or if they could I never heard of it”) underscores a McCarthy-like skepticism about institutions’ ability to reform the truly predatory, suggesting that governance can manage behavior but cannot reliably manufacture virtue.