Motivational Quotes

Politics

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Cannon, Joseph

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

Higgins, George V.

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

Jimmy Wales

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

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

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

10.

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

Swift, Jonathan

11.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Reagan, Ronald

12.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

13.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

14.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

15.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

16.

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

17.

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.

18.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

19.

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

20.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

21.

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

Arbuthnot, John

22.

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

23.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

24.

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

Eban, Abba

25.

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.

26.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

27.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

28.

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.

29.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

30.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

31.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

32.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

33.

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

34.

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

35.

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

Greeley, Horace

36.

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

Cary, Joyce

37.

The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.

Seneca

38.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

39.

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

Fischer, John

40.

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

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

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

44.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

45.

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

46.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

47.

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

Barres

48.

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

Rogers, Will

49.

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

50.

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus