Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

The abjection of our political situation is the only true challenge today. Only facing up to this situation in all its desperation can help us get out of it.

Baudrillard, Jean

Politics is a choice of enemas. You're gonna get it up the ass, no matter what you do.

Higgins, George V.

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

Kissinger, Henry

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

John Kenneth Galbraith

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

The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal, not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society.

Marx, Karl

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

Parkinson, Cecil

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Tomlin, Lily

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

10.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

Albert Einstein

11.

When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer present or not guilty.

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

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

Byrne, Robert

13.

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

14.

The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.

Nunn, Gregory

15.

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

16.

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

Benn, Tony

17.

The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.

Chapman, John Jay

18.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

Kennedy, John F.

19.

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

Bryan, William Jennings

20.

Every clique is a refuge for incompetence. It fosters corruption and disloyalty, it begets cowardice, and consequently is a burden upon and a drawback to the progress of the country. Its instincts and actions are those of the pack.

Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame

21.

The essential ingredient in politics is timing.

Trudeau, Pierre Elliott

22.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.

Thoreau, Henry David

23.

Most people assume the fights are going to be the left versus the right, but it always is the reasonable versus the jerks.

Jimmy Wales

24.

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

Welles, Orson

25.

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

26.

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

27.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.

Ernest Benn

28.

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

29.

I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.

Byron, Lord

30.

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

31.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

32.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

33.

I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.

Rogers, Will

34.

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.

Armey, Dick

35.

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.

36.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

37.

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

38.

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.

39.

Don't fall in love with politicians, they're all a disappointment. They can't help it, they just are.

Noonan, Peggy

40.

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

41.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

42.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

43.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

44.

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

Gaulle, Charles De

45.

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Coolidge, Calvin

46.

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

47.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

48.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

49.

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

Fischer, John

50.

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