Motivational Quotes

Politics

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

- Auden, W. H.

Best Quotes about Politics

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

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

Ambrose Bierce

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Will Rogers

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

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

Arbuthnot, John

10.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

11.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

12.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

13.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

15.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

16.

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.

Kennedy, John F.

17.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

18.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

19.

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

Swift, Jonathan

20.

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

21.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

22.

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

23.

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

24.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

Bagehot, Walter

26.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

27.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

28.

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

29.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

30.

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

31.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Macaulay, Lord

32.

Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.

Dane, Frank

33.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

34.

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

35.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

36.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

37.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

38.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

39.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

40.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

41.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Major, John

42.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

43.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

44.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

45.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

46.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

47.

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

48.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

49.

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

Quinton, John

50.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony