Motivational Quotes

Politics

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

- Clark, Alan

Best Quotes about Politics

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

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

Eban, Abba

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

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

Naito, Fern

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.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

10.

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

11.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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.

14.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

16.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

17.

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

18.

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

Paul Valery

19.

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

Mitchell, George J.

20.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

21.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

22.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

23.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

24.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

25.

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

Dane, Frank

26.

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

27.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Will Rogers

28.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

29.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

30.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

31.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

32.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

33.

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

Mark B. Cohen

34.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

36.

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

Kempton, Murray

37.

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

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.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

40.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

42.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

43.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

44.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

45.

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

46.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

47.

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.

48.

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

Rogers, Will

49.

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.

50.

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