Motivational Quotes

Politics

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

- Macaulay, Lord

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.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

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

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Disraeli, Benjamin

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

10.

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

11.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

12.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Kempton, Murray

14.

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

Roche, John P.

15.

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

Mencken, H. L.

16.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

17.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

18.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

19.

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

20.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

21.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

22.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

23.

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

24.

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

25.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

26.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

27.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

28.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

29.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

30.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Ephron, Nora

31.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

32.

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

Certeau, Michel De

33.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

34.

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.

35.

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

Noonan, Peggy

36.

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

Thatcher, Margaret

37.

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

38.

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

Hubbard, Kin

39.

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

40.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

41.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

42.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

48.

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

Eban, Abba

49.

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

Macmillan, Harold

50.

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