Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

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

Dane, Frank

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

Mencken, H. L.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

10.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

11.

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.

12.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

13.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

14.

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.

15.

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

16.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

17.

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

Swift, Jonathan

18.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

19.

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

Macmillan, Harold

20.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

21.

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

22.

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

Rogers, Will

23.

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

Taft, William Howard

24.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

28.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

29.

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

Bush, George

30.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

31.

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.

32.

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

33.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Ameringer, Oscar

34.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

35.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

36.

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

37.

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

Roosevelt, Theodore

38.

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

39.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

40.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Major, John

41.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

42.

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.

43.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Rostand, Jean

44.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

48.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

49.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

50.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill