Motivational Quotes

Politics

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

- Culbertson, Ely

Best Quotes about Politics

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

If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line to our own, we become more polarized, more set in our own ways. It will only reinforce and deepen the political divides in our country. But if we choose to actively seek out information that challenges our assumptions and beliefs, perhaps we can begin to understand where the people who disagree with us are coming from.

President Barack Obama

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

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

Marquis, Don

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

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

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

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

10.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

11.

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

Platen

12.

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

13.

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

Will, George F.

14.

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

Mitchell, George J.

15.

The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.

Swift, Jonathan

16.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

18.

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

19.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

20.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

21.

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

Johnson, Lyndon B.

22.

One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.

Weber, Max

23.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

25.

A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.

Maugham, W. Somerset

26.

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

27.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

28.

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

Broun, Heywood

29.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Arbuthnot, John

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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.

33.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

34.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

35.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

36.

Until you've been in politics you've never really been alive; it's rough and sometimes it's dirty and it's always hard work and tedious details. But, it's the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.

37.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

38.

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

Alfred E. Newman

39.

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

Major, John

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

Fuller, R. Buckminster

43.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

44.

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

Byrne, Robert

45.

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

Bush, George

46.

Now, we deny not, but that politicians may sometimes abuse religion, and make it serve for the promoting of their own private interests and designs; which yet they could not do so well neither, were the thing itself a mere cheat and figment of their own, and had no reality at all in nature, nor anything solid at the bottom of it.

Cudworth, Ralph J.

47.

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

Plato

48.

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

Welles, Orson

49.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

50.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.