Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Lincoln, Abraham

Best Quotes about Politics

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

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

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

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

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

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.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Weber, Max

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

10.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

11.

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

Macmillan, Harold

12.

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

13.

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

Swift, Jonathan

14.

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

Hubbard, Kin

15.

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.

16.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

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.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

19.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

20.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

21.

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.

22.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

23.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

Jackson, Jesse

25.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

26.

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

27.

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

Brown, Jerry

28.

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

29.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

30.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

31.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

32.

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

Higgins, George V.

33.

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

34.

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

35.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

40.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

41.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

45.

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

Arbuthnot, John

46.

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

47.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

48.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

49.

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

50.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.