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

To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.

Platen

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

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

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

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

Nixon, Richard M.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

Noonan, Peggy

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

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

Kennedy, Joseph

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Orwell, George

13.

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

14.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Richardson, Elliot

15.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel

16.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

17.

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

19.

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

20.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

21.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

22.

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

Truman, Harry S

23.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

24.

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

25.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

26.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl

27.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

28.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

29.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

30.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

31.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

32.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

33.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

34.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

35.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

36.

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

Albert Einstein

37.

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

38.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

Bagehot, Walter

39.

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

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

40.

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

Nunn, Gregory

41.

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

Greeley, Horace

42.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

43.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

44.

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

45.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

46.

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

47.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

48.

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

Fredrich

49.

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

50.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame