Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Major, John

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

Cooper, James F.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

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

Certeau, Michel De

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

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

10.

Politics are now nothing more than means of rising in the world. With this sole view do men engage in politics, and their whole conduct proceeds upon it.

Johnson, Samuel

11.

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

Horace

12.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

13.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

14.

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.

15.

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

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

17.

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

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.

Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.

Mcluhan, Marshall

20.

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

21.

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.

22.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

23.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

24.

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

Swift, Jonathan

25.

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

26.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

27.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

28.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

29.

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

30.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

31.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

32.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

33.

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

Truman, Harry S

34.

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

Forbes, Malcolm S.

35.

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

Gaitskell, Hugh

36.

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

37.

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

38.

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

39.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

40.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

41.

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

42.

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

Rogers, Will

43.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

44.

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

45.

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

46.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

47.

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

48.

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

49.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

50.

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

Aristotle