Motivational Quotes

Politics

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

- Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Best Quotes about Politics

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

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

Wilde, Oscar

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

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.

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

Brown, Jerry

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

10.

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

11.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

12.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

13.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

14.

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

Welles, Orson

15.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

16.

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

Benn, Tony

17.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

18.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

19.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

20.

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

Greeley, Horace

21.

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

22.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

23.

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.

24.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

25.

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

Broun, Heywood

26.

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

27.

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

Russell, Dora

28.

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

29.

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

30.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

31.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

32.

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

33.

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Napoleon III

34.

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

35.

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

Rogers, Will

36.

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

37.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

38.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

39.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

40.

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

41.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

42.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

47.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

48.

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

49.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

50.

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.