Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Carlyle, Thomas

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

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.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

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

Higgins, George V.

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

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

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

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

10.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

11.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

12.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

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.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

15.

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

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

17.

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

18.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

19.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

20.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

21.

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

22.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

23.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

24.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

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

26.

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

Churchill, Winston

27.

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

28.

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

Dane, Frank

29.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

30.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

31.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

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

33.

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

Pell, Claiborne

34.

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

35.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

36.

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

Lowman, Hariold

37.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

38.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

39.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

40.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

41.

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

42.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

43.

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

44.

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

Nathan, George Jean

45.

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

46.

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.

47.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

48.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

49.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

50.

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama