Motivational Quotes

Politics

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

- Baruch, Bernard M.

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Roche, John P.

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

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

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

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

Aristotle

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

10.

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

11.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

Benn, Tony

15.

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

16.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

17.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

18.

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

19.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

20.

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

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

22.

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Orwell, George

23.

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

Grant, Amy

24.

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

25.

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

26.

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

Dane, Frank

27.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

28.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

29.

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

30.

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

31.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

32.

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

Arbuthnot, John

33.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

34.

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

35.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

36.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

37.

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

Greeley, Horace

38.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

39.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

Rogers, Will

41.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

42.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

43.

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