Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Hattersley, Roy

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

10.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

11.

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

Nunn, Gregory

13.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

14.

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

Certeau, Michel De

15.

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

Arbuthnot, John

16.

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.

17.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

18.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

19.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

20.

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

Welles, Orson

21.

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

Roche, John P.

22.

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

Truman, Harry S

23.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

24.

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

25.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Huxley, Aldous

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

30.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

Aristotle

34.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

35.

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

Rogers, Will

36.

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

37.

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

40.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

41.

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

42.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

43.

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

Rogers, Will

44.

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

Fischer, John

45.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

46.

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

47.

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

Tweed, Boss

48.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

49.

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

Major, John

50.

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