Motivational Quotes

Politics

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

- Macmillan, Harold

Best Quotes about Politics

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

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.

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

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

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

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

Clarke, James Freeman

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

10.

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

11.

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

Eban, Abba

12.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

13.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

14.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

15.

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

17.

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.

18.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

19.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

20.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

21.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

22.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

23.

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

Heine, Heinrich

24.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Greeley, Horace

25.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

26.

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

Macmillan, Harold

27.

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

Rostand, Jean

28.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

29.

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

Hattersley, Roy

30.

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

31.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Reagan, Ronald

32.

The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.

Seneca

33.

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

38.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

39.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

40.

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

41.

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

Pepper, Claude D.

42.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

43.

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

44.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

45.

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

46.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

47.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

48.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

50.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres