Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

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

Barres

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

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

Parkinson, Cecil

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

Baudrillard, Jean

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

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

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

10.

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.

11.

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.

12.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Camus, Albert

13.

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.

14.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

18.

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

Ephron, Nora

19.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

20.

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

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

22.

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

23.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

24.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

25.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

26.

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

27.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

28.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

32.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

Hazlitt, William

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

40.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

41.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

42.

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

Rogers, Will

43.

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

Bagehot, Walter

44.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

45.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

46.

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

Rogers, Will

47.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Ameringer, Oscar

48.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

49.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

50.

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander