Motivational Quotes

Politics

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

- Truman, Harry S

Best Quotes about Politics

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

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

Thatcher, Margaret

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen.

Churchill, Winston

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.

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

Noonan, Peggy

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

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

Hearst, William Randolph

10.

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

Rostand, Jean

11.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

12.

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

13.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

14.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

15.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

16.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

17.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

18.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

19.

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.

20.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

21.

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

22.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

23.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

24.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

27.

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

28.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

29.

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

30.

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

31.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

32.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

Plato

35.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

36.

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Deighton, Len

37.

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

38.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

45.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

46.

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

47.

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

Fischer, John

48.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

49.

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

Benn, Tony

50.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.