Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

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

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

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

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

10.

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

R. A. Butler

11.

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

Kempton, Murray

12.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

16.

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

Alfred E. Newman

17.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

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

19.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

21.

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

22.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

Kissinger, Henry

25.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

26.

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

27.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

28.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

29.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

30.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

31.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

32.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

33.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

34.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

36.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

Lippmann, Walter

37.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

38.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

39.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

40.

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

41.

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

Churchill, Winston

42.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

Seneca

44.

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

45.

Yogi met George Bush during an election campaign. Bush said Texas was important. Yogi said Texas has a lot of electrical votes.

Berra, Yogi

46.

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

47.

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.

48.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

49.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Fuller, R. Buckminster

50.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.