Motivational Quotes

Politics

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

- Hattersley, Roy

Best Quotes about Politics

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Paul Valery

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

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

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

Barres

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

Lincoln, Abraham

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

10.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

11.

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

Wilde, Oscar

12.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

13.

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

Heine, Heinrich

14.

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

15.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

16.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

17.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

22.

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

23.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

24.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

25.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

26.

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

27.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

28.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

29.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

30.

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.

31.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

32.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

33.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

34.

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

Tweed, Boss

35.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

36.

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

Ephron, Nora

37.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

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

Swift, Jonathan

44.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

45.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

46.

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

47.

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Gaulle, Charles De

48.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

49.

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.

50.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will