Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Plato

Best Quotes about Politics

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

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

Noonan, Peggy

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

10.

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

Plato

11.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

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.

13.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

14.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

15.

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.

16.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

17.

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

Field, Franklin

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

21.

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

Wilde, Oscar

22.

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

23.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

24.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

25.

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

26.

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

Jackson, Jesse

27.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

28.

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

29.

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

Truman, Harry S

30.

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

33.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

34.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

35.

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

36.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

37.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

38.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

39.

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

Hubbard, Kin

40.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

41.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

42.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

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.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

45.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

46.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

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