Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread -- in Ireland,sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!

Dickens, Charles

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

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

Kempton, Murray

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

Gaulle, Charles De

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.

Russell, Dora

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

10.

Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

Rogers, Will

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

15.

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

Cannon, Joseph

16.

Before we get too depressed about the state of our politics, let's remember our history. The great debates of the past, all stirred great passions. They all made somebody angry, and at least once led to a terrible war. What is amazing, is that despite all the conflict, our experiment in democracy has worked better than any form of government on earth.

President Barack Obama

17.

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

18.

People with high ideals don't necessarily make good politicians. If clean politics is so important, we should leave the job to scientists and the clergy.

Watanabe, Michio

19.

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

20.

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

21.

It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead for fifteen years.

Truman, Harry S

22.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

23.

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

Lieberman, Gerald F.

24.

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

Will, George F.

25.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

26.

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

27.

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

28.

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

Eban, Abba

29.

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

30.

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

31.

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

32.

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

33.

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

Horace

34.

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

35.

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

Maugham, W. Somerset

36.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

37.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

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.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

40.

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

Noonan, Peggy

41.

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

42.

Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.

Ehrenreich, Barbara

43.

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

44.

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

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

45.

Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

Churchill, Winston

46.

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

47.

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