Motivational Quotes

Politics

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

- Weber, Max

Best Quotes about Politics

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

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

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

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

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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

Bevan, Aneurin

10.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

11.

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.

12.

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.

13.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

14.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

15.

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

16.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

17.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

18.

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.

19.

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

Safire, William

20.

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

Will, George F.

21.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

22.

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

Ephron, Nora

24.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

25.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

26.

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

Rogers, Will

27.

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

28.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

29.

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

30.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

31.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

32.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

33.

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

Will, George F.

34.

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

35.

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

36.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

37.

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.

38.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

39.

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Brodie, Fawn M.

40.

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.

41.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

42.

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

43.

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

44.

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

Churchill, Winston

45.

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

46.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose

47.

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

48.

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

Greeley, Horace

49.

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

Welles, Orson

50.

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.