Motivational Quotes

Politics

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

- Johnson, Pamela Hansford

Best Quotes about Politics

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

Kempton, Murray

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

Margaret Cho

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

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

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

Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.

Jefferson, Thomas

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

Dixon, Alan

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

Many politicians lay it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

Macaulay, Lord

10.

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

11.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

12.

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

Benn, Tony

13.

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

Fuller, R. Buckminster

14.

In politics, as in life, we must above all things wish only for the attainable.

Heine, Heinrich

15.

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

Reagan, Ronald

16.

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

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

18.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

19.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

21.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Naito, Fern

29.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

30.

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

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

31.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

32.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

33.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

34.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

35.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

36.

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

40.

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

Wilde, Oscar

41.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

42.

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

Major, John

43.

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

44.

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

45.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

46.

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

47.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

48.

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

Eban, Abba

49.

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

Arbuthnot, John

50.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin