Motivational Quotes

Politics

When great questions end, little parties begin.

- Bagehot, Walter

Best Quotes about Politics

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

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

Brogan, Denis E.

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

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

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

10.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

11.

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.

12.

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

Noonan, Peggy

13.

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

Wilde, Oscar

14.

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

15.

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

Broun, Heywood

16.

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

Mencken, H. L.

17.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

18.

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

19.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

21.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

22.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

23.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

24.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

25.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

26.

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

Alfred E. Newman

27.

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.

28.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

29.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

30.

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

31.

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

Arbuthnot, John

32.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

33.

No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

37.

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

Mitchell, George J.

38.

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

39.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

40.

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

Benn, Tony

41.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

42.

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

Bush, George

43.

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

44.

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Napoleon III

45.

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Gaulle, Charles De

46.

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

47.

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

Major, John