Motivational Quotes

Politics

Finality is not the language of politics.

- Disraeli, Benjamin

Best Quotes about Politics

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

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

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

13.

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

14.

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

Brown, Jerry

15.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

16.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Greeley, Horace

20.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

21.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

22.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

23.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

24.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Colby, Frank Moore

25.

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

Plato

26.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

27.

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.

28.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

29.

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

Heine, Heinrich

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

33.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

34.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

35.

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

Eban, Abba

36.

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

Russell, Dora

37.

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

Roche, John P.

38.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

39.

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

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

40.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

41.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

42.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

43.

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

Platen

44.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

45.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

46.

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.

47.

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

Churchill, Winston

48.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

49.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

50.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.