Motivational Quotes

Politics

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

- French National Assembly

Best Quotes about Politics

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

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

Peter, Laurence J.

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

Fredrich

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.

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

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

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.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

10.

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

George, David Lloyd

11.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

12.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

13.

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

14.

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

Major, John

15.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

16.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

17.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

18.

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

Huxley, Aldous

19.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

20.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

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.

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Goldwater, Barry

23.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

24.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

25.

I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talk politics.

Wilde, Oscar

26.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

27.

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

Hearst, William Randolph

28.

In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.

Roche, John P.

29.

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

30.

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

31.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

32.

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.

33.

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

Certeau, Michel De

34.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

35.

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.

36.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

37.

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

38.

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

39.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

40.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

41.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

42.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

43.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

44.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

45.

Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.

Brogan, Denis E.

46.

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

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

47.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

48.

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

49.

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

Eban, Abba

50.

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