Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Nixon, Richard M.

Best Quotes about Politics

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

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

Rogers, Will

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

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

Rogers, Will

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

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

Marquis, Don

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

10.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

Taft, William Howard

12.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

13.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

14.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

15.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

16.

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

Noonan, Peggy

17.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

18.

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

19.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

20.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

21.

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

Greeley, Horace

22.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Deighton, Len

23.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

24.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Mitchell, George J.

25.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

26.

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.

27.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

28.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

29.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

30.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

31.

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

32.

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

33.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

34.

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

35.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

36.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

37.

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

Margaret Cho

38.

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

Mencken, H. L.

39.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

40.

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

41.

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

Swift, Jonathan

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

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

Benn, Tony

45.

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

46.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

47.

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

Huxley, Aldous

48.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

49.

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