Motivational Quotes

Politics

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.

Best Quotes about Politics

It is my settled opinion, after some years as a political correspondent, that no one is attracted to a political career in the first place unless he is socially or emotionally crippled.

Waugh, Auberon

Politics is the art of the next best.

Bismarck, Otto Von

Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.

Chapman, John Jay

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

Horace

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

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

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

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

Nixon, Richard M.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

10.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

11.

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

Hubbard, Kin

12.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

13.

Crime does not pay ... as well as politics.

Alfred E. Newman

14.

I played by the rules of politics as I found them.

Nixon, Richard M.

15.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

16.

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

Clarke, James Freeman

17.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

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

Certeau, Michel De

21.

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

22.

Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

Mitchell, George J.

23.

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

Herriot, Edouard

24.

It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle's eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.

Nkrumah, Kwame

25.

Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.

Noonan, Peggy

26.

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

Truman, Harry S

27.

We are the trade union for pensioners and children, the trade union for the disabled and the sick... the trade union for the nation as a whole.

Heath, Edward

28.

The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.

Baudrillard, Jean

29.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

30.

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

Ephron, Nora

31.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

32.

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

Humphrey, Hubert H.

33.

Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say In spite of all! has the calling for politics.

Weber, Max

34.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

35.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

36.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Bush, George

40.

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

Hubbard, Kin

41.

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

Halifax, Edward F.

42.

I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

Gaulle, Charles De

43.

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.

44.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

45.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

46.

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

Parkinson, Cecil

47.

There are two types of politicians: the ones that are courageous and honest, and the ones that have a steep career.

Kocher, Gerhard

48.

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

49.

A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.

Disraeli, Benjamin

50.

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