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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

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

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

10.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

11.

When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

13.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

14.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

15.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people... then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.

Ringer, Robert J.

17.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

18.

I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.

Bryan, William Jennings

19.

When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it, and I didn't inhale, and I never tried again.

Clinton, Bill

20.

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

Deighton, Len

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

25.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

26.

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

27.

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

28.

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

29.

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

Byrne, Robert

30.

People start parades -- politicians just get out in front and act like they're leading.

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

31.

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Welles, Orson

32.

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

Eban, Abba

33.

The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.

Roosevelt, Theodore

34.

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.

Auden, W. H.

35.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

36.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

37.

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

Field, Franklin

38.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

Ashdown, Paddy

39.

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

Wilde, Oscar

40.

In the domain of Political Economy, free scientific inquiry meets not merely the same enemies as in all other domains. The peculiar nature of the material it deals with, summons as foes into the field of battle the most violent, mean and malignant passions of the human breast, the Furies of private interest.

Marx, Karl

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

44.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

45.

I find myself... hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Pope, Alexander

46.

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

47.

Politicians -- power itself -- are abject because they merely embody the profound contempt people have for their own lives. One should be grateful to the politicians for accepting the abstractness of power, and ridding others of its burden. This inevitably kills them but they get their revenge by passing onto others the corpse of power.

Baudrillard, Jean

48.

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

Bolingbroke, Henry

49.

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

50.

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