Motivational Quotes

Politics

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

- Bevan, Aneurin

Best Quotes about Politics

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Will, George F.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

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

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

10.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

11.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party's worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Rogers, Will

12.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

16.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Rostand, Jean

18.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

19.

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

20.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

21.

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

Kissinger, Henry

22.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

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

24.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

25.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

26.

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

Heine, Heinrich

27.

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.

28.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

29.

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

30.

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

Benn, Tony

31.

Until you've been in politics you've never really been alive; it's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But, it's the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.

32.

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

33.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

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.

35.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

36.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

37.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

38.

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

39.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

40.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

41.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

45.

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

Fischer, John

46.

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

47.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

48.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

49.

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

50.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.