Motivational Quotes

Politics

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

- Brown, Jerry

Best Quotes about Politics

Until you've been in politics you've never really been alive; it's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But, it's the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.

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

Noonan, Peggy

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Goldwater, Barry

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

10.

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

Will, George F.

11.

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

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

14.

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.

15.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Major, John

16.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

17.

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

Byrne, Robert

18.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

19.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

20.

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

21.

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

Paul Valery

22.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

23.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

24.

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

Ephron, Nora

25.

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.

26.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

27.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

28.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Churchill, Winston

29.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

30.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

31.

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

Tweed, Boss

32.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

33.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen.

Churchill, Winston

37.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

40.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

41.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

42.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

43.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

44.

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

45.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

46.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

47.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.