Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Cannon, Joseph

Best Quotes about Politics

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

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

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

At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Macmillan, Harold

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

Alfred E. Newman

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

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Will, George F.

10.

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

11.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

12.

Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.

Dane, Frank

13.

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

Greeley, Horace

14.

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

Tweed, Boss

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.

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

17.

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

Deighton, Len

18.

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

19.

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

Taft, William Howard

20.

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

21.

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

22.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

23.

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

29.

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

30.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

32.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

33.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

34.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

35.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

36.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

37.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

38.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

42.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

43.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

44.

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

Noonan, Peggy

45.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

46.

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

Ephron, Nora

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

49.

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

50.

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