Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

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

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

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

Nathan, George Jean

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

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

10.

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

11.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

12.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

13.

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

Noonan, Peggy

14.

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

15.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

16.

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

Dane, Frank

17.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

18.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Disraeli, Benjamin

19.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

20.

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

21.

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.

Ameringer, Oscar

22.

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

23.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

24.

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

25.

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

Truman, Harry S

26.

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

27.

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

Margaret Cho

28.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Will Rogers

29.

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

Reagan, Ronald

30.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Rostand, Jean

31.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

32.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel

33.

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

34.

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

35.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

36.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

38.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

39.

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

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

42.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

43.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

44.

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

45.

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

Noonan, Peggy

46.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

47.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

48.

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

49.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

50.

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

Hubbard, Kin