Motivational Quotes

Politics

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

- Banfield, Edward C.

Best Quotes about Politics

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

Rosenberg, Harold

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

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

Rogers, Will

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

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

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

Landor, Walter Savage

10.

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

11.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

12.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

14.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

15.

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

16.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

17.

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

18.

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.

19.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

20.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

21.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

22.

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

Albert Einstein

23.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

24.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

25.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

26.

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

27.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

28.

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

Kissinger, Henry

29.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

30.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

31.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

32.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

33.

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

34.

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

35.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

37.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

38.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

39.

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

Swift, Jonathan

40.

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

41.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

42.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

43.

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

44.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

45.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

46.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

47.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

48.

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

Pell, Claiborne

49.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.