Motivational Quotes

Politics

In politics the middle way is none at all.

- Adams, John

Best Quotes about Politics

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.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

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

Barres

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

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

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

Kocher, Gerhard

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

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

Paul Valery

10.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

11.

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

Bacon, Francis

12.

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

13.

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

14.

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

Russell, Dora

15.

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

Noonan, Peggy

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

19.

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

20.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

21.

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

Dane, Frank

22.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

23.

The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.

Nixon, Richard M.

24.

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

25.

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

Mark B. Cohen

26.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

27.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

28.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

29.

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

Churchill, Winston

30.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

31.

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

Hubbard, Kin

32.

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.

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.

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

Cannon, Joseph

35.

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

Will, George F.

36.

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

37.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

38.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

39.

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

40.

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

41.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

42.

In the school of political projectors, I was but ill entertained, the professors appearing, in my judgment, wholly out of their senses; which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity, and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities, and eminent services, of instructing princes to know their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employment persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive; and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

Swift, Jonathan

43.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

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.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Mitchell, George J.

46.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

47.

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

48.

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

49.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

50.

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