Motivational Quotes

Politics

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

- Nixon, Richard M.

Best Quotes about Politics

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

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

A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.

Broun, Heywood

Nobody is a friend of ours. Let's face it.

Nixon, Richard M.

The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare.

Major, John

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

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

Bevan, Aneurin

A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.

Brodie, Fawn M.

10.

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

Paul Valery

11.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

12.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Aristotle

13.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

14.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

15.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

16.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

17.

Politics are for foreigners with their endless wrongs and paltry rights. Politics are a lousy way to get things done. Politics are, like God's infinite mercy, a last resort.

O'Rourke, P. J.

18.

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

Plato

19.

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

Churchill, Winston

20.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

Will Rogers

21.

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

22.

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

23.

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

24.

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

25.

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

Ephron, Nora

26.

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

Rostand, Jean

27.

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

Macmillan, Harold

28.

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

29.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

30.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.

31.

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

Kissinger, Henry

32.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

33.

Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.

Reagan, Ronald

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Montalbano, Benjamin J.

38.

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

Stevenson, Adlai E.

39.

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference, so endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.

Rich, Adrienne

40.

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

Cannon, Joseph

41.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

42.

Man is by nature a political animal.

Aristotle

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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.

47.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

Mark B. Cohen

48.

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

49.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

50.

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