Motivational Quotes

Politics

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

- Orwell, George

Best Quotes about Politics

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

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

Greeley, Horace

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

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.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

10.

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jackson, Jesse

11.

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

Macmillan, Harold

12.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

13.

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

Hattersley, Roy

14.

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

Rostand, Jean

15.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

16.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

17.

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

Truman, Harry S

18.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

19.

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

20.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

21.

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

22.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

23.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

24.

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

25.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

26.

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

Nathan, George Jean

27.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

28.

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

29.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

30.

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

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

33.

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

34.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Auden, W. H.

35.

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Napoleon III

36.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

37.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

38.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

39.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

40.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

41.

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

42.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

43.

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

44.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

45.

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.

46.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

47.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

48.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

49.

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.