Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Politics

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

Field, Franklin

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

Wilde, Oscar

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

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

10.

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

Major, John

11.

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

12.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

13.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

14.

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

15.

It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.

Carlyle, Thomas

16.

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

Rogers, Will

17.

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

18.

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

19.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

20.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

21.

When you've got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.

Naito, Fern

22.

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

23.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

24.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

25.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

26.

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

Will Rogers

27.

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

Swift, Jonathan

28.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

29.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

30.

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

31.

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

Horace

32.

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

Macmillan, Harold

33.

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

Hijazi, Muhammad

34.

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.

35.

I do not deny that there may be other well-founded causes for the hatred which various classes feel toward politicians, but the main one seems to me that politicians are symbols of the fact that every class must take every other class into account.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

36.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Roosevelt, Theodore

37.

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

38.

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

39.

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

40.

The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.

Culbertson, Ely

41.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

42.

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

Galsworthy, John

43.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

44.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

45.

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

Huxley, Aldous

46.

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

Rostand, Jean

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.

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

49.

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

50.

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

Hubbard, Kin