Motivational Quotes

Politics

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

- Cudworth, Ralph J.

Best Quotes about Politics

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

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

Broun, Heywood

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

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

Dane, Frank

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

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

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

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

Larry Hardiman

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

Ephron, Nora

10.

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.

11.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

12.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

13.

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

Pell, Claiborne

14.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

15.

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

Paul Valery

16.

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

17.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

18.

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

Kempton, Murray

19.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

20.

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

Roche, John P.

21.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

22.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

23.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

24.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

25.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Nathan, George Jean

29.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

30.

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

31.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

32.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

33.

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

34.

We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Heath, Edward

35.

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.

Swift, Jonathan

36.

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

37.

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

38.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

43.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

44.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

45.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

46.

Political image is like mixing cement. When it's wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there's almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

Mondale, Walter F.

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

Lincoln, Abraham

50.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.