Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

Canning, George

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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

Welles, Orson

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

Adams, Henry Brooks

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

10.

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

11.

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

Taft, William Howard

12.

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

13.

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

Bagehot, Walter

14.

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

Horace

15.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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

17.

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.

Bagehot, Walter

18.

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

Mitchell, George J.

19.

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

20.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

21.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

22.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

23.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

24.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

25.

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

Roche, John P.

26.

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

27.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

28.

When the political columnists say'Every thinking man'they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to'Every intelligent voter'they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Franklin P. Adams

29.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

30.

A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.

Chapman, John Jay

31.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

32.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

33.

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

34.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

36.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

37.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

38.

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

39.

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

40.

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

41.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

42.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

43.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

44.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

45.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

46.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

47.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

48.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

49.

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

50.

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