Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Humphrey, Hubert H.

Best Quotes about Politics

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

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Orwell, George

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.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

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

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

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

10.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

11.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

12.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

13.

Until you've been in politics you've never really been alive; it's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But, it's the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.

14.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

18.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

19.

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.

20.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

21.

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

22.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

23.

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

24.

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

25.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

26.

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

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

Churchill, Winston

28.

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

29.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

30.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl

31.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

32.

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

Paul Valery

33.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

34.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

35.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

Arbuthnot, John

37.

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

Rogers, Will

38.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

39.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

40.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

41.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

42.

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

Larry Hardiman

43.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

44.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

45.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

46.

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

Eban, Abba

47.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Fuller, R. Buckminster

48.

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

Will Rogers

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.

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

Barres