Motivational Quotes

Politics

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Politics

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

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

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

Mitchell, George J.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

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

Kissinger, Henry

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

Margaret Cho

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

10.

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.

11.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

12.

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

13.

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

14.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

15.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

16.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

17.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

18.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

19.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

20.

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

Alfred E. Newman

21.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

22.

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

23.

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

Seneca

24.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

25.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

26.

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

Arbuthnot, John

27.

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

28.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

29.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

30.

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

31.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

32.

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

33.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

34.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Deighton, Len

35.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

36.

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

Charles De Gaulle

37.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

38.

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.

39.

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

40.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

41.

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

42.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

43.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

44.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

45.

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

Rogers, Will

46.

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

47.

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

Cary, Joyce

48.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

49.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

50.

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.