Motivational Quotes

Politics

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

- Napoleon III

Best Quotes about Politics

I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.

Tweed, Boss

This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

Wilson, Harold

The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.

Napoleon III

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

Einstein, Albert

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.

Mcewan, Ian

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

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

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

Major, John

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

10.

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

11.

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

Plato

12.

Beware the politically obsessed. They are often bright and interesting, but they have something missing in their natures; there is a hole, an empty place, and they use politics to fill it up. It leaves them somehow misshapen.

Noonan, Peggy

13.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

14.

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

Peter, Laurence J.

15.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Paul Valery

16.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

Hattersley, Roy

17.

Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.

Churchill, Winston

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

21.

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

22.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

23.

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

Greeley, Horace

24.

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

25.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

26.

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

Gorbachev, Mikhail

27.

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

Wilde, Oscar

28.

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

Heine, Heinrich

29.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

30.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

31.

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

Hubbard, Kin

32.

The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.

Benn, Tony

33.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

34.

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

35.

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

Lowman, Hariold

36.

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

Franklin, Billy Boy

37.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Huxley, Aldous

38.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

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

Welles, Orson

40.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

41.

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

Cary, Joyce

42.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

43.

A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

44.

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

45.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

46.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

50.

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