Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Coolidge, Calvin

Best Quotes about Politics

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

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

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

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

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

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

Greeley, Horace

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

10.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

11.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

12.

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

13.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

14.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

15.

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

16.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

17.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

18.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

19.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

20.

To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.

Platen

21.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

22.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

23.

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

24.

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

Byrne, Robert

25.

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

Field, Franklin

26.

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

Bagehot, Walter

27.

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

Rogers, Will

28.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

29.

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

30.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

31.

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

Brown, Jerry

32.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

33.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

34.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

38.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

39.

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.

40.

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.

41.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

42.

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

43.

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

Charles De Gaulle

44.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

45.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

46.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

47.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

48.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

49.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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