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 is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

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

Nathan, George Jean

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

Reagan, Ronald

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

Noonan, Peggy

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose

10.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

11.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

12.

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

13.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

Goldwater, Barry

15.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

17.

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

18.

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

Alfred E. Newman

19.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

21.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

22.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

23.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

24.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

25.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

29.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

30.

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

Jackson, Jesse

31.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

32.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

33.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

34.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

35.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

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

37.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Disraeli, Benjamin

38.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

39.

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.

40.

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

41.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

42.

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

43.

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

Broun, Heywood

44.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

45.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

46.

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

47.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

48.

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

Swift, Jonathan

49.

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

Hearst, William Randolph

50.

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