Motivational Quotes

Politics

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

- Lippmann, Walter

Best Quotes about 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.

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

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

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Maugham, W. Somerset

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

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

Taft, William Howard

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

10.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

11.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

12.

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

Goldwater, Barry

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

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.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Rostand, Jean

17.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

18.

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

Benn, Tony

19.

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

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

20.

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

Hattersley, Roy

21.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

22.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

23.

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

Shakespeare, William

24.

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.

25.

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.

26.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

27.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

28.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

30.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

31.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

32.

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

33.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

34.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

35.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

36.

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

Roche, John P.

37.

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

Safire, William

38.

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

39.

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

40.

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.

41.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

42.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.