Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

Shakespeare, William

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

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

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

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

Cannon, Joseph

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

10.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

11.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

12.

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

Mitchell, George J.

13.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

14.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

15.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

16.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

17.

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

Churchill, Winston

18.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Huxley, Aldous

19.

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

20.

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

21.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

22.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

23.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

28.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

29.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

30.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

31.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

32.

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

Goldwater, Barry

33.

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

Barres

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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

Cameron, W. J.

37.

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.

38.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

39.

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

40.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

41.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

42.

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

43.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

44.

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.

45.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Fuller, R. Buckminster

46.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

47.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

48.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Major, John

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.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel