Motivational Quotes

Politics

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Politics

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

Safire, William

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

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

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

10.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

11.

Before we get too depressed about the state of our politics, let's remember our history. The great debates of the past, all stirred great passions. They all made somebody angry, and at least once led to a terrible war. What is amazing, is that despite all the conflict, our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth.

President Barack Obama

12.

The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.

Seneca

13.

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

14.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

15.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

16.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

17.

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

18.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

19.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

20.

The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.

Nixon, Richard M.

21.

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.

22.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

23.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

24.

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

25.

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Noonan, Peggy

26.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

27.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

28.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

29.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

30.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

31.

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

32.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

33.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

34.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

35.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Mcluhan, Marshall

36.

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

Rogers, Will

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Benn, Tony

39.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

40.

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

Macmillan, Harold

41.

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

42.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

43.

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

44.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

45.

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

Ambrose Bierce

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

50.

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss