Motivational Quotes

Politics

Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn't happen.

- Churchill, Winston

Best Quotes about Politics

To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.

Platen

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

Truman, Harry S

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

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

Macmillan, Harold

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

10.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

11.

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

12.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

14.

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

17.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

18.

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

Cooper, James F.

19.

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.

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.

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

22.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

23.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

24.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

25.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

26.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

27.

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

Horace

28.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Greeley, Horace

29.

Successful democratic politicians are insecure and intimidated men. They advance politically only as they placate, appease, bribe, seduce, bamboozle, or otherwise manage to manipulate the demanding and threatening elements in their constituencies. The decisive consideration is not whether the proposition is good but whether it is popular -- not whether it will work well and prove itself but whether the active talking constituents like it immediately. Politicians rationalize this servitude by saying that in a democracy public men are the servants of the people.

Lippmann, Walter

30.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

31.

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

Nunn, Gregory

32.

Yogi met George Bush during an election campaign. Bush said Texas was important. Yogi said Texas has a lot of electrical votes.

Berra, Yogi

33.

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

34.

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

Huxley, Aldous

35.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

36.

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

37.

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

38.

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

39.

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

Marquis, Don

40.

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

41.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

42.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

43.

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

Hazlitt, William

44.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

45.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

46.

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

Cannon, Joseph

47.

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

Barres

48.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

50.

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

Heine, Heinrich