Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

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

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

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

Charles De Gaulle

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

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

10.

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

11.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

12.

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

13.

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

14.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

15.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

16.

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

Mitchell, George J.

17.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

18.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

19.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

20.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

21.

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

22.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

23.

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.

24.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Ameringer, Oscar

25.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Ephron, Nora

26.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

27.

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

Hearst, William Randolph

28.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

29.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

30.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

31.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

32.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

36.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

37.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

38.

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.

39.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

40.

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

41.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

42.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

43.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

44.

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.

45.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

49.

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

Marquis, Don

50.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay