Motivational Quotes

Politics

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

- Bolingbroke, Henry

Best Quotes about Politics

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

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

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

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

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.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

12.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

16.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

17.

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

18.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

19.

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

20.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

21.

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

Hubbard, Kin

22.

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

Greeley, Horace

23.

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

Tweed, Boss

24.

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

25.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

Auden, W. H.

26.

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

27.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

28.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Rogers, Will

29.

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

30.

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

Swift, Jonathan

31.

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

Russell, Dora

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.

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

Ephron, Nora

34.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

35.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

37.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

38.

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

39.

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

40.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

41.

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

Roosevelt, Theodore

42.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

44.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

45.

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

46.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

47.

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

48.

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!

Trotsky, Leon

49.

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