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

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!

Trotsky, Leon

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

Thoreau, Henry David

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

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

Peter, Laurence J.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

10.

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

Rostand, Jean

11.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

Hazlitt, William

12.

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

Will Rogers

13.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

14.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

15.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

16.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

17.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

18.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Charles De Gaulle

19.

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

Swift, Jonathan

20.

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

21.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

28.

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

29.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

30.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

31.

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

32.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

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

34.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

36.

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

37.

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

38.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

39.

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

40.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

41.

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

42.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

43.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

44.

The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.

Nixon, Richard M.

45.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

46.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

47.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

48.

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

49.

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

Eban, Abba

50.

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