Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

R. A. Butler

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

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

Major, John

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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

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

Noonan, Peggy

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

Political image is like mixing cement. When it's wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there's almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

Mondale, Walter F.

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

10.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

11.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

Bagehot, Walter

13.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

14.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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.

18.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

19.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

20.

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

Marquis, Don

21.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

22.

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

23.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

24.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

25.

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

Swift, Jonathan

26.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Benn, Tony

30.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

31.

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

Greeley, Horace

32.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

33.

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.

34.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

35.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

36.

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

37.

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

38.

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

Hattersley, Roy

39.

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

40.

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

41.

Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.

Dane, Frank

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

45.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

46.

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

47.

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