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

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

Truman, Harry S

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Baudrillard, Jean

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

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

Jefferson, Thomas

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

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

You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year's one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.

Clinton, Bill

10.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

11.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

12.

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

Major, John

13.

Politician: From the Greek poly (many) and the French t?te (head or face, as in t?te-?-t?te: head to head or face to face). Hence

Pitt, Martin

14.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

15.

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

Paul Valery

16.

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

Rostand, Jean

17.

Finality is not the language of politics.

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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.

19.

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

Seneca

20.

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

21.

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

Plato

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

26.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

27.

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

28.

Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.

Disraeli, Benjamin

29.

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.

Burke, Edmund

30.

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

Byrne, Robert

31.

Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.

Will, George F.

32.

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.

33.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

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.

Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.

Certeau, Michel De

36.

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

White, Elwyn Brooks

37.

Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain.

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Churchill, Winston

39.

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

Fischer, John

40.

The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.

Bevan, Aneurin

41.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

42.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

The lounge of the main hotel is full of jollity, with large comfortable men sitting in braces; the bar is packed with talkative intellectuals, full of witty disloyalties. The next week the main hotel is suddenly full of dinner-jackets and large hats. The girls are dressed as if for a weekend in the country. When one of the great men of the party comes through, the crowd edges respectfully away, murmuring loyal noises.

Sampson, Anthony

48.

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

Greeley, Horace

49.

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.

50.

Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

Kissinger, Henry