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

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

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

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

Lincoln, Abraham

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

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

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

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

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

10.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

11.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

12.

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

Will, George F.

13.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

14.

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

15.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

16.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Churchill, Winston

17.

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

Russell, Dora

18.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

19.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

20.

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

Broun, Heywood

21.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

22.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

23.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

24.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

25.

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

26.

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

Benn, Tony

27.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

28.

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

Thatcher, Margaret

29.

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.

30.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

31.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

32.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

33.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

34.

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

35.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

36.

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.

37.

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

Noonan, Peggy

38.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

39.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

40.

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

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

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

42.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

43.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

44.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

45.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

46.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

47.

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

Bagehot, Walter

48.

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