Motivational Quotes

Politics

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.

Best Quotes about Politics

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Orwell, George

10.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

11.

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.

12.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

13.

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

14.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

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.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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.

18.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

19.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

20.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

22.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

23.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

24.

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

25.

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

Arbuthnot, John

26.

Politics, when I am in it, it makes me sick.

Taft, William Howard

27.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

28.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

29.

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

30.

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

Alfred E. Newman

31.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

32.

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

Churchill, Winston

33.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

34.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

35.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Colby, Frank Moore

36.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

37.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

38.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Macaulay, Lord

39.

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

Seneca

40.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

41.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

42.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

43.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

44.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

45.

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

Will, George F.

46.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

47.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

48.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

49.

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

50.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel