Motivational Quotes

Politics

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

- Waugh, Auberon

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Nixon, Richard M.

Before we get too depressed about the state of our politics, let's remember our history. The great debates of the past, all stirred great passions. They all made somebody angry, and at least once led to a terrible war. What is amazing, is that despite all the conflict, our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth.

President Barack Obama

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

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.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

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.

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

10.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

11.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

12.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

16.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

17.

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

Gorbachev, Mikhail

18.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

19.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

23.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

24.

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

Welles, Orson

25.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

26.

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

Benn, Tony

27.

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

28.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

31.

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

32.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

35.

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

36.

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

R. A. Butler

37.

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

38.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

39.

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

40.

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

Roche, John P.

41.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

42.

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

43.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

44.

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

45.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

46.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

50.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.