Motivational Quotes

Politics

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

- Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

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

Seneca

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

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

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

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

10.

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

11.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Hattersley, Roy

12.

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

13.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Reagan, Ronald

14.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

15.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

16.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

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

18.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

19.

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

Welles, Orson

20.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

21.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

Lippmann, Walter

22.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

23.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

24.

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

25.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

26.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

27.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

28.

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

Swift, Jonathan

29.

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

30.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

31.

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.

32.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

36.

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

Will, George F.

37.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Greeley, Horace

38.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

39.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

40.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

41.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Churchill, Winston

42.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

43.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

44.

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

45.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

46.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

47.

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

48.

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

Dane, Frank

49.

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

50.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson