Motivational Quotes

Politics

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

- Noonan, Peggy

Best Quotes about Politics

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.

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

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

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

Benn, Tony

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

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

10.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

11.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

12.

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

Swift, Jonathan

13.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

14.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

15.

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

16.

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

17.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

18.

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

Mitchell, George J.

19.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

21.

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.

22.

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

23.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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.

28.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

29.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

30.

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

Hubbard, Kin

31.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

32.

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

33.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

34.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

35.

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

Mark B. Cohen

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 will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

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

Noonan, Peggy

39.

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

Bush, George

40.

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

Seneca

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

46.

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

47.

Noonan, Peggy

48.

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

49.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

50.

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