Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

Best Quotes about Politics

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.

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

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

Byrne, Robert

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

Welles, Orson

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

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

10.

The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Lippmann, Walter

11.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

12.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

Quinton, John

14.

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

Will, George F.

15.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

16.

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.

17.

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

Rogers, Will

18.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

19.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

20.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

21.

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

22.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

23.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

24.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

25.

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

Huxley, Aldous

26.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

27.

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

Mccarthy, Mary

28.

Politician: From the Greek poly (many) and the French t?te (head or face, as in t?te-?-t?te: head to head or face to face). Hence

Pitt, Martin

29.

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

Platen

30.

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

31.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

32.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

33.

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

34.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

35.

We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Heath, Edward

36.

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

Goldwater, Barry

37.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

38.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

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

Franklin, Billy Boy

40.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

41.

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

Alfred E. Newman

42.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

43.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

44.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

45.

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

46.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

47.

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

48.

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

Hubbard, Kin

49.

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

50.

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