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

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

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

Jackson, Jesse

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

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

Truman, Harry S

11.

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

12.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

13.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

14.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

15.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

16.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

17.

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

18.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

19.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

20.

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

Marquis, Don

21.

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

22.

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Brodie, Fawn M.

23.

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

Roosevelt, Theodore

24.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

25.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

26.

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

Greeley, Horace

27.

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

28.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

29.

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

30.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

31.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

32.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Auden, W. H.

33.

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

34.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

35.

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.

36.

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.

37.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

38.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

39.

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

40.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

41.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

45.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

46.

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

50.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho