Motivational Quotes

Politics

Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

- Orwell, George

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman

You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on -- into the dustbin of history!

Trotsky, Leon

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

Kissinger, Henry

Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.

Truman, Harry S

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

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

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

Rogers, Will

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

If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.

Sherman, William T.

10.

In politics, an absurdity in public business is going into it.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

11.

No wonder that, when a political career is so precarious, men of worth and capacity hesitate to embrace it. They cannot afford to be thrown out of their life's course by a mere accident.

Bryce, James

12.

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

13.

There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics -- none in which there is more need of good pilots and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise high.

Huxley, Thomas H.

14.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

Rogers, Will

15.

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

Marquis, Don

16.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

17.

My constituency is the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected and the despised.

Jackson, Jesse

18.

Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide.

Kennedy, Joseph

19.

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

20.

A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.

Mill, John Stuart

21.

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

Koestler, Arthur

22.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

23.

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

Horace

24.

When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.

Truman, Harry S

25.

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

26.

You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.

Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy

27.

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

28.

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.

Bagehot, Walter

29.

There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.

Shakespeare, William

30.

Politics, when I am in it, it makes me sick.

Taft, William Howard

31.

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

Benn, Tony

32.

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

Heine, Heinrich

33.

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

Clough, Arthur Hugh

34.

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

Churchill, Winston

35.

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

36.

A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.

Baruch, Bernard M.

37.

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

38.

To know your place is a good idea in politics. That is not to say stay in your place or hang on to your place, because ambition or boredom may dictate upward or downward mobility, but a sense of place -- a feel for one's own position in the control room -- is useful in gauging what you should try to do.

Safire, William

39.

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

Noonan, Peggy

40.

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

41.

Politics is largely a matter of heart.

R. A. Butler

42.

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

43.

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

Truman, Harry S

44.

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

Major, John

45.

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

Paul Valery

46.

There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.

Clark, Alan

47.

Politics is applesauce.

Will Rogers

48.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Richardson, Elliot

49.

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

French National Assembly

50.

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

Wilde, Oscar