Motivational Quotes

Politics

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

- Lincoln, Abraham

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.

Powell, L. R.

What this country needs is radicals who will stay that way regardless of the creeping years.

Fischer, John

People who leave Washington do so by way of the box... ballet or coffin.

Pell, Claiborne

All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are up to a point.

Will, George F.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

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.

10.

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

Huxley, Aldous

11.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

12.

I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.

Truman, Harry S

13.

The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.

Seneca

14.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Bacon, Francis

15.

In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.

Churchill, Winston

16.

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.

Bradlee, Ben C.

17.

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

Rostand, Jean

18.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

20.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

21.

Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don't go in for politics.

Camus, Albert

22.

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

23.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

24.

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

Naito, Fern

25.

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

26.

There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.

Rogers, Will

27.

I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.

Thatcher, Margaret

28.

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.

Cannon, Joseph

29.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

30.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

Colby, Frank Moore

31.

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

32.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

33.

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

34.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

35.

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

36.

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

37.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

38.

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

Kempton, Murray

39.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

40.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

41.

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

Heine, Heinrich

42.

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

Will, George F.

43.

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jackson, Jesse

44.

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

Shakespeare, William

45.

The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.

Plato

46.

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

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

50.

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

Major, John