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

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

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

Hattersley, Roy

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

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

Tweed, Boss

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

Will, George F.

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.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

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.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

10.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

11.

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

12.

Before we get too depressed about the state of our politics, let's remember our history. The great debates of the past, all stirred great passions. They all made somebody angry, and at least once led to a terrible war. What is amazing, is that despite all the conflict, our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth.

President Barack Obama

13.

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

Hubbard, Kin

14.

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

15.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

16.

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Bolingbroke, Henry

17.

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

18.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

19.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

20.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

21.

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

22.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

23.

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

Hearst, William Randolph

24.

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

Mencken, H. L.

25.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

26.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

27.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

28.

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

29.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

30.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

31.

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

Broun, Heywood

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Taft, William Howard

35.

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

36.

Lippmann, Walter

37.

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

Heine, Heinrich

38.

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

39.

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

Roche, John P.

40.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

41.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

42.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

43.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

44.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Camus, Albert

45.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

46.

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

47.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

48.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

49.

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

Swift, Jonathan

50.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean