Motivational Quotes

Politics

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

- Twain, Mark

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

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

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

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

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.

Auden, W. H.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

10.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

11.

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

12.

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

Dane, Frank

13.

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

14.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

15.

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

16.

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

17.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

18.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

19.

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

20.

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

21.

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

22.

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

Wilde, Oscar

23.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

24.

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

Hubbard, Kin

25.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

26.

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

27.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

28.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

29.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

30.

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

31.

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

Pell, Claiborne

32.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

34.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

35.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

36.

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

37.

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

38.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

39.

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

40.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

41.

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

42.

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

Brown, Jerry

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

46.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

48.

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

Certeau, Michel De

49.

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.

50.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.