Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

I am really sorry to see my countrymen trouble themselves about politics. If men were wise, the most arbitrary princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the freest government is compelled to be a tyranny. Princes appear to me to be fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something else besides human life.

Blake, William

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

Alfred E. Newman

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.

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Dalton Camp

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

Plato

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

The news of any politician's death should be listed under Public Improvements.

Dane, Frank

Mediocrity in politics is not to be despised. Greatness is not needed.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

Henry Cate VII

10.

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

11.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

The two-party system has given this country the war of Lyndon Johnson, the Watergate of Nixon, and the incompetence of Carter. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life-rafts.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

13.

My life's work has been accomplished. I did all that I could.

Gorbachev, Mikhail

14.

Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.

Peter, Laurence J.

15.

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

Ameringer, Oscar

16.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

17.

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

18.

No party is as bad as its leaders.

Rogers, Will

19.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

20.

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

21.

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle

22.

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

Rogers, Will

23.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

24.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

25.

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

26.

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

Einstein, Albert

27.

Once you run for office, you're in it -- sort of like going into the military. You'd better be damned sure it is what you want to do and that the rest of your life is set up to accommodate that. It takes a certain toll on your personality and on your family life. I've seen it personally.

Kennedy Jr., John F.

28.

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

Nunn, Gregory

29.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

30.

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

31.

One thing about a pig, he thinks he's warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, each one's nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.

Mccarthy, Eugene J.

32.

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

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.

Cameron, W. J.

35.

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

Welles, Orson

36.

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

Rostand, Jean

37.

It doesn't matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.

Brown, Jerry

38.

Any man with a fine shock of hair, a good set of teeth, and a bewitching smile can park his brains, if he has any, and run for public office.

39.

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

Mark B. Cohen

40.

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

Bevan, Aneurin

41.

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.

42.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and Hence Clamorous To Be Led To Safety] by an endless series of hobgoblins.

Mencken, H. L.

43.

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

Fischer, John

44.

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.

45.

If a politician isn't doing it to his wife , then he's doing it to his country.

Grant, Amy

46.

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

Orwell, George

47.

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

Albert Einstein

48.

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