Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Higgins, George V.

Best Quotes about Politics

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

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

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

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

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

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.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

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

Fredrich

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jackson, Jesse

10.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

11.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

12.

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

13.

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

Broun, Heywood

14.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

15.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

16.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

17.

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

18.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

19.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Rogers, Will

20.

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

Rogers, Will

21.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

22.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

23.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

26.

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

Herriot, Edouard

27.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

28.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

29.

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

30.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

31.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

32.

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

33.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

34.

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

Rogers, Will

35.

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

Eban, Abba

36.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

37.

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

38.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

39.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

40.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

41.

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.

42.

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.

43.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

47.

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

48.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

49.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

50.

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

Shakespeare, William