Motivational Quotes

Politics

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

- Safire, William

Best Quotes about Politics

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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

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

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

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

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

Reagan, Ronald

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

10.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

11.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

12.

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

13.

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

14.

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

Byrne, Robert

15.

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

16.

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

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

17.

I have come to the conclusion that politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Charles De Gaulle

18.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

19.

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

Truman, Harry S

20.

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

Arbuthnot, John

21.

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

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

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

Welles, Orson

24.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Maugham, W. Somerset

25.

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

26.

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

Benn, Tony

27.

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

Macmillan, Harold

28.

Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.

Dane, Frank

29.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

30.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

31.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

33.

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

34.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

35.

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

Mitchell, George J.

36.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

37.

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

Orwell, George

38.

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

39.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

40.

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

41.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

42.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

43.

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

Nunn, Gregory

44.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

45.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

46.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

47.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

48.

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

49.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

50.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.