Motivational Quotes

Politics

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Politics

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

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

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

Greeley, Horace

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.

Swift, Jonathan

10.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

11.

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

12.

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

Macmillan, Harold

13.

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

14.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

15.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

16.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

17.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

18.

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

19.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

20.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

21.

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

22.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

23.

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

24.

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

25.

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jackson, Jesse

26.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

27.

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

28.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

29.

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

30.

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

Will, George F.

31.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

32.

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

33.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

34.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Major, John

36.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

37.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

38.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

39.

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

40.

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

Rogers, Will

41.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

42.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

43.

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

44.

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

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

45.

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

46.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

47.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

48.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

50.

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.