Motivational Quotes

Politics

When great questions end, little parties begin.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Politics

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

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.

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

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

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

Grant, Amy

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

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

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

Lincoln, Abraham

10.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

11.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

12.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

13.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

14.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

15.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Bush, George

20.

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

21.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

22.

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

Hearst, William Randolph

23.

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

24.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

25.

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

26.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

27.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Ameringer, Oscar

28.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

29.

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

30.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

31.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Will Rogers

32.

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

33.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

34.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

35.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

Goldwater, Barry

37.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

38.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

39.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

40.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

41.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

42.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

43.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

44.

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.

45.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party's worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Rogers, Will

46.

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

47.

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

48.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

49.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

50.

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

Tweed, Boss