Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Lincoln, Abraham

Best Quotes about Politics

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

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

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

Margaret Cho

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

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

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

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

Eban, Abba

10.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

11.

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

Berra, Yogi

12.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

13.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

14.

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

15.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

16.

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

Swift, Jonathan

17.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

18.

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

19.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

20.

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

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.

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.

23.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

24.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Hearst, William Randolph

28.

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

Reagan, Ronald

29.

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

30.

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.

31.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

33.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

34.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

35.

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

36.

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

Seneca

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

40.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

41.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Hattersley, Roy

42.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

43.

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

Will, George F.

44.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

45.

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

Truman, Harry S

46.

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

47.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

48.

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.

49.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

50.

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

Paul Valery