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

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

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

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.

Anderson, John B.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

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.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

10.

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

Heine, Heinrich

11.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

Robert Louis Stevenson

12.

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

13.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

14.

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

Coolidge, Calvin

15.

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

Kissinger, Henry

16.

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

17.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

18.

The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.

Nixon, Richard M.

19.

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

Certeau, Michel De

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.

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

22.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

23.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

24.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

25.

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.

26.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

27.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

28.

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

29.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

30.

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

Safire, William

31.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

32.

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

Macmillan, Harold

33.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

34.

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

35.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

36.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

37.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

38.

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

Nunn, Gregory

39.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

40.

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

41.

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

42.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

43.

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.

44.

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

Cannon, Joseph

45.

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

46.

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

Bush, George

47.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

48.

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

49.

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

50.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein