Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

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

Rogers, Will

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn't work very well.

Deighton, Len

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

Goldwater, Barry

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

Kempton, Murray

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

10.

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

Horace

11.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

12.

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.

13.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

14.

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

15.

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

16.

In politics, yesterday's lie is attacked only to flatter today's.

Rostand, Jean

17.

In politics... shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.

Tocqueville, Alexis De

18.

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

Kirkpatrick, Jeane

19.

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

20.

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

Quinton, John

21.

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

Herriot, Edouard

22.

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

Byrne, Robert

23.

In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.

Parkinson, Cecil

24.

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

25.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

26.

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

Hijazi, Muhammad

27.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

28.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

29.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

30.

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

Heine, Heinrich

31.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

32.

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

Naito, Fern

33.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

34.

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

Roche, John P.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

46.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

47.

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

Halifax, Edward F.

48.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry

49.

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

50.

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