Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Galbraith, John Kenneth

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

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

Will, George F.

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

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

We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.

Benn, Tony

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

Rogers, Will

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

10.

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

Gorbachev, Mikhail

11.

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.

12.

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

Churchill, Winston

13.

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

Pell, Claiborne

14.

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

Junius

15.

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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.

17.

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

Mencken, H. L.

18.

Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we're going forward to tomorrow or whether we're going to go past to the back!

Quayle, Dan

19.

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

Johnson, Lyndon B.

20.

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

Seneca

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.

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

Langley, Edward

23.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

24.

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

25.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

26.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

27.

The success of a party means little more than that the Nation is using the party for a large and definite purpose. It seeks to use and interpret a change in its own plans and point of view.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

28.

Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint -- Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate. The fact of the matter is that most of the problems that we now face are technical problems, are administrative problems. They are very sophisticated judgments, which do not lend themselves to the great sort of passionate movements which have stirred this country so often in the past. [They] deal with questions which are now beyond the comprehension of most men.

Kennedy, John F.

29.

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

30.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

31.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

32.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

33.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

34.

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.

35.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

39.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

41.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Naito, Fern

45.

The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.

Clough, Arthur Hugh

46.

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

Will, George F.

47.

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

48.

In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill... we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.

Plato

49.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

50.

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