Motivational Quotes

Politics

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

- Blake, William

Best Quotes about Politics

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

Hubbard, Kin

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

Alfred E. Newman

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

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

Fredrich

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

Baudrillard, Jean

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

Rogers, Will

11.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

16.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

17.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

18.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

19.

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

20.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

21.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

22.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Camus, Albert

23.

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

24.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

25.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

26.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

27.

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.

28.

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

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

30.

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

31.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

32.

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

Arbuthnot, John

33.

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

34.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Greeley, Horace

35.

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

Albert Einstein

36.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

37.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

38.

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

Barres

39.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

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

41.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

42.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

43.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

44.

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

45.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

46.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

47.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

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