Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Bonaparte, Napoleon

Best Quotes about Politics

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Arbuthnot, John

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

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

Bryan, William Jennings

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.

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

10.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

11.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

12.

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

13.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

14.

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

Seneca

15.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

16.

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

Rosenberg, Harold

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

20.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

21.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Mitchell, George J.

22.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

23.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

24.

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

25.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

26.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

27.

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

Will, George F.

28.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

29.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Deighton, Len

30.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

31.

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

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

32.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

33.

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

Rogers, Will

34.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

35.

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

36.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

37.

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

Albert Einstein

38.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

39.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

40.

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

41.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

42.

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

Rostand, Jean

43.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

Lippmann, Walter

44.

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.

45.

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

Shakespeare, William

46.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

47.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.