Motivational Quotes

Politics

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

- John Kenneth Galbraith

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

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

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

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

Quinton, John

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

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

10.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

11.

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.

12.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

15.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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.

At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Macmillan, Harold

18.

To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.

Platen

19.

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

20.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

21.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

22.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

23.

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

24.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

25.

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

Churchill, Winston

26.

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

Paul Valery

27.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

28.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

29.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

30.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

32.

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

33.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

34.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

35.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

36.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

37.

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.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

38.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

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

40.

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.

41.

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

Orwell, George

42.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

44.

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

Seneca

45.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

46.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

47.

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

48.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

49.

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

Marquis, Don

50.

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