Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Cooper, James F.

Best Quotes about Politics

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.

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

In politics you must always keep running with the pack. The moment that you falter and they sense that you are injured, the rest will turn on you like wolves.

R. A. Butler

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

Cary, Joyce

Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

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

Hattersley, Roy

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

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

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.

10.

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

11.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

12.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

13.

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

Aristotle

14.

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

Truman, Harry S

15.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

16.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

17.

The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you've got to admit that each party's worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Rogers, Will

18.

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

Alfred E. Newman

19.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

20.

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

21.

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

Pell, Claiborne

22.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

23.

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

24.

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

Macmillan, Harold

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

28.

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

Rostand, Jean

29.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

30.

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.

31.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

33.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

34.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

35.

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

36.

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

Plato

37.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

38.

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

Kempton, Murray

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

43.

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

44.

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

Ephron, Nora

45.

If you're I politics and you can't tell when you walk into a room who's for you and who's against you, then you're in the wrong line of work.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

46.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

Reagan, Ronald

47.

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

48.

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

49.

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

Lincoln, Abraham

50.

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