Motivational Quotes

Politics

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

- Ambrose Bierce

Best Quotes about Politics

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Bolingbroke, Henry

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

10.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

11.

At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Macmillan, Harold

12.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

13.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

15.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Rogers, Will

16.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

17.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl

18.

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

19.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

20.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

21.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Maugham, W. Somerset

22.

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

23.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

24.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

25.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

27.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

28.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

29.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

30.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

31.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

32.

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!

Trotsky, Leon

33.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

34.

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.

Swift, Jonathan

35.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

36.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

37.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

38.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

Hazlitt, William

39.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

40.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

41.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

42.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

43.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

44.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

45.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

46.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

47.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

48.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

49.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Charles De Gaulle

50.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean