Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

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

Goldwater, Barry

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Peter, Laurence J.

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

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

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

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

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

10.

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Bolingbroke, Henry

11.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

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

Kempton, Murray

13.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

14.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

15.

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

16.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

17.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

18.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

19.

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.

20.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

21.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

22.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Weber, Max

23.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

24.

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

25.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

26.

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.

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.

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

29.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

30.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

31.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

32.

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

Welles, Orson

33.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

34.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

38.

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

Brown, Jerry

39.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

40.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

41.

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

42.

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

Ephron, Nora

43.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

44.

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

Truman, Harry S

45.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.