Motivational Quotes

Politics

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

- Cannon, Joseph

Best Quotes about Politics

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

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

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

10.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Macaulay, Lord

12.

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

Roche, John P.

13.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

14.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

15.

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

16.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

17.

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

18.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

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

Rogers, Will

20.

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

Churchill, Winston

21.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

22.

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

23.

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

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

Ephron, Nora

25.

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

26.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

27.

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

28.

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

29.

A politician's words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.

Will, George F.

30.

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

31.

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

Heine, Heinrich

32.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

33.

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.

34.

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

35.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

36.

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

37.

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

Barres

38.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

39.

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

40.

No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

41.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

42.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

43.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.