Motivational Quotes

Politics

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

- Richardson, Elliot

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

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

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

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

Orwell, George

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

Parkinson, Cecil

10.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

11.

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

Noonan, Peggy

12.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

13.

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.

14.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

15.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

16.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

17.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Ephron, Nora

18.

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

19.

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

Nunn, Gregory

20.

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

21.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

22.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

23.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

24.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

Lincoln, Abraham

25.

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.

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.

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

Broun, Heywood

28.

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

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

29.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

30.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

31.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

32.

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

Hubbard, Kin

33.

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

Rogers, Will

34.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

35.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

36.

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

Rogers, Will

37.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

38.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

39.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

40.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

41.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

42.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

46.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

47.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

48.

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

Seneca

49.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

50.

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