Motivational Quotes

Politics

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.

Best Quotes about Politics

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

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

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

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

Paul Valery

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.

10.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

11.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

12.

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

Quinton, John

13.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

14.

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

Mencken, H. L.

15.

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

Rogers, Will

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

18.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

19.

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

20.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

21.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

22.

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

Will, George F.

23.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

24.

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

Alfred E. Newman

25.

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

26.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

28.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

Lincoln, Abraham

29.

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

30.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Charles De Gaulle

34.

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.

35.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

36.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

37.

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

38.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

39.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

40.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

41.

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

42.

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

43.

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

Franklin, Billy Boy

44.

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

Shakespeare, William

45.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

46.

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Noonan, Peggy

47.

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

48.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

49.

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

50.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary