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

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

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.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

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 one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.

Nixon, Richard M.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Churchill, Winston

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

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.

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

13.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

14.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

15.

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

16.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

17.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

18.

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

Churchill, Winston

19.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

20.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

21.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

22.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

23.

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

Benn, Tony

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

26.

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

27.

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

28.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

29.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

30.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

31.

Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.

Dane, Frank

32.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

33.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

34.

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

Orwell, George

35.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Mitchell, George J.

37.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

38.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

39.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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.

43.

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

Broun, Heywood

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.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

46.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.