Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Benn, Tony

Best Quotes about Politics

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

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

Seneca

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

Mark B. Cohen

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

10.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

11.

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

12.

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

13.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

14.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

15.

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

16.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

17.

Political image is like mixing cement. When it's wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there's almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

Mondale, Walter F.

18.

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

Tweed, Boss

19.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

23.

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.

24.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

25.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

26.

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

27.

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

28.

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.

29.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

30.

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.

31.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

32.

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

Arbuthnot, John

33.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

34.

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

40.

We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Heath, Edward

41.

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

45.

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.

46.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

47.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

48.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

49.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

50.

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

Broun, Heywood