Motivational Quotes

Politics

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Politics

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

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.

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

Barres

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

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

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

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

Auden, W. H.

10.

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.

11.

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

Albert Einstein

12.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

13.

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

14.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

15.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

16.

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

Field, Franklin

17.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

18.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

19.

Yogi met George Bush during an election campaign. Bush said Texas was important. Yogi said Texas has a lot of electrical votes.

Berra, Yogi

20.

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

Mark B. Cohen

21.

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

Broun, Heywood

22.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

23.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

24.

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

25.

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

26.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

27.

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

28.

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

Rogers, Will

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Macaulay, Lord

32.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

33.

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.

34.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

36.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

38.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

39.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

40.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Noonan, Peggy

44.

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

Bagehot, Walter

45.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

46.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

47.

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

48.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

49.

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

Hattersley, Roy

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