Motivational Quotes

Politics

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

- Kennedy Jr., John F.

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Margaret Cho

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

Yogi met George Bush during an election campaign. Bush said Texas was important. Yogi said Texas has a lot of electrical votes.

Berra, Yogi

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

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

Higgins, George V.

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

Albert Einstein

10.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

11.

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

12.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Seneca

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

20.

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

21.

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

Deighton, Len

22.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

23.

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

Bacon, Francis

24.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

25.

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

26.

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

Charles De Gaulle

27.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

28.

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

Macmillan, Harold

29.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

30.

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

Reagan, Ronald

31.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

32.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

33.

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

34.

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

Jackson, Jesse

35.

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

Cannon, Joseph

36.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

37.

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

38.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

39.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

40.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

41.

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

Orwell, George

42.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

43.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

44.

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.

45.

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

46.

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

47.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

48.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

49.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

50.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.