Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Bush, George

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Swift, Jonathan

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

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

Will, George F.

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

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Noonan, Peggy

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

Margaret Cho

Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.

Brittain, Vera

10.

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

11.

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

12.

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

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

14.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

15.

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

16.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

17.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

18.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

19.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

20.

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.

21.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

22.

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

23.

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

Cooper, James F.

24.

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

Macmillan, Harold

25.

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

Bacon, Francis

26.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

27.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

28.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

29.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

30.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

31.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Colby, Frank Moore

32.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Ephron, Nora

33.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

34.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Reagan, Ronald

35.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

36.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

37.

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

38.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

39.

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

40.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

41.

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

Dane, Frank

42.

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

43.

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

44.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

45.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

46.

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

Tweed, Boss

47.

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

48.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

49.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl