Motivational Quotes

Politics

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

- Nixon, Richard M.

Best Quotes about Politics

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

We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Heath, Edward

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

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

Heine, Heinrich

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Cooper, James F.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

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

Rostand, Jean

10.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

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

Charles De Gaulle

14.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

15.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

16.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

18.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

19.

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

20.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

21.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

22.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

23.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

24.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

25.

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

Seneca

26.

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

Macmillan, Harold

27.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

28.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Marquis, Don

33.

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

Dane, Frank

34.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

35.

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

36.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

38.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

39.

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

Rostand, Jean

40.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

41.

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.

42.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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.

46.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Richardson, Elliot

47.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

48.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

49.

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

Swift, Jonathan

50.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose