Motivational Quotes

Politics

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, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

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.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

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

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

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

Ephron, Nora

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

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

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

10.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

11.

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

Macmillan, Harold

12.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

13.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

14.

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

Noonan, Peggy

15.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

Larry Hardiman

18.

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

Barres

19.

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

20.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

21.

Political image is like mixing cement. When it's wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there's almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

Mondale, Walter F.

22.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

25.

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

26.

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

Certeau, Michel De

27.

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

28.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

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

30.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Camus, Albert

31.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

32.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

33.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

34.

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.

35.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

36.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

37.

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

38.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

39.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

40.

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

Tweed, Boss

41.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

48.

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

Will, George F.

49.

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