Motivational Quotes

Politics

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.

Best Quotes about Politics

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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

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

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

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

Macmillan, Harold

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

10.

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

Noonan, Peggy

11.

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

Margaret Cho

12.

Politician: From the Greek poly (many) and the French t?te (head or face, as in t?te-?-t?te: head to head or face to face). Hence

Pitt, Martin

13.

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

14.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

15.

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

Brodie, Fawn M.

16.

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

17.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

18.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

19.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

21.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

25.

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

26.

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

Taft, William Howard

27.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

28.

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.

29.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

30.

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.

31.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

Lincoln, Abraham

32.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

33.

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.

34.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

35.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

36.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

37.

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

Barres

38.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

39.

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

40.

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

41.

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

Rogers, Will

42.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

43.

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.

44.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

45.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

46.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Weber, Max

47.

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

48.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

49.

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

50.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius