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

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

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

Noonan, Peggy

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

Swift, Jonathan

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Noonan, Peggy

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

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

Rostand, Jean

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

10.

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

11.

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

12.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party's worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Rogers, Will

13.

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

Hubbard, Kin

14.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

15.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Rogers, Will

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.

Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen.

Churchill, Winston

19.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

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.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

22.

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

23.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

24.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

25.

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.

26.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

27.

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

Swift, Jonathan

28.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

29.

Lippmann, Walter

30.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

31.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

32.

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

Arbuthnot, John

33.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

34.

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

35.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

36.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

37.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

38.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

39.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

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

Pell, Claiborne

43.

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.

44.

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

45.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

46.

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

47.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

48.

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

Churchill, Winston

49.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

50.

Politics is applesauce.