Motivational Quotes

Politics

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

- Bolingbroke, Henry

Best Quotes about Politics

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Auden, W. H.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

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.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!

Trotsky, Leon

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

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.

10.

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

11.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

12.

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.

13.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

14.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

16.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

18.

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

19.

I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

Rogers, Will

20.

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

21.

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

Hubbard, Kin

22.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

23.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

24.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

25.

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

Brogan, Denis E.

26.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

27.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

28.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

30.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

31.

Politician: From the Greek poly (many) and the French t?te (head or face, as in t?te-?-t?te: head to head or face to face). Hence

Pitt, Martin

32.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

33.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

34.

Politics, when I am in it, it makes me sick.

Taft, William Howard

35.

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

Brown, Jerry

36.

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

37.

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

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

38.

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

Charles De Gaulle

39.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

40.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

41.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

42.

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

43.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

44.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

45.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

46.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

47.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

48.

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

49.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

50.

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