Motivational Quotes

Politics

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

- Brodie, Fawn M.

Best Quotes about Politics

Before we get too depressed about the state of our politics, let's remember our history. The great debates of the past, all stirred great passions. They all made somebody angry, and at least once led to a terrible war. What is amazing, is that despite all the conflict, our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth.

President Barack Obama

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

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

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

10.

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

Seneca

11.

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

12.

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

13.

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

14.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

18.

Politics, when I am in it, it makes me sick.

Taft, William Howard

19.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Hattersley, Roy

20.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Maugham, W. Somerset

21.

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

22.

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

Charles De Gaulle

23.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

24.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

26.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose

27.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

28.

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

29.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

30.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

31.

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

32.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

33.

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

Franklin, Billy Boy

34.

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

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

35.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

36.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

37.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Albert Einstein

41.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

42.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

43.

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

44.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

45.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

Paul Valery

47.

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