Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Napoleon III

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Brodie, Fawn M.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

10.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

11.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

12.

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

Benn, Tony

13.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

14.

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

Marquis, Don

15.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

16.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

17.

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

18.

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

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

19.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

20.

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

Jackson, Jesse

21.

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.

22.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

23.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Colby, Frank Moore

24.

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

Fredrich

25.

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

Berra, Yogi

26.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Rogers, Will

33.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

34.

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

Macmillan, Harold

35.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

36.

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

37.

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

38.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

39.

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

Taft, William Howard

40.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

41.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

42.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

43.

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

44.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

45.

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.

46.

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

Churchill, Winston

47.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

48.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

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.

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