Motivational Quotes

Politics

To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.

- Platen

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Roche, John P.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

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

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

13.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

Hubbard, Kin

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

18.

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.

19.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

20.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

21.

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

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

25.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

26.

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

Rostand, Jean

27.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

28.

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.

29.

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

30.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

31.

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

32.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

33.

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

34.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Fuller, R. Buckminster

35.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Rogers, Will

36.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

37.

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

Noonan, Peggy

38.

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

Bush, George

39.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

40.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

41.

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.

42.

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

Macmillan, Harold

43.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

45.

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

Shakespeare, William

46.

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Bolingbroke, Henry

47.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

48.

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

Nunn, Gregory

49.

Until you've been in politics you've never really been alive; it's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But, it's the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.

50.

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

Will, George F.