Motivational Quotes

Politics

In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one's party three times a day.

- Rostand, Jean

Best Quotes about Politics

When great questions end, little parties begin.

Bagehot, Walter

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

Churchill, Winston

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

As in private life one differentiates between what a man thinks and says of himself and what he really is and does, so in historical struggles one must still more distinguish the language and the imaginary aspirations of parties from their real organism and their real interests, their conception of themselves from their reality.

Marx, Karl

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.

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

A politician would do well to remember that he has to live with his conscience longer than he does with his constituents.

Laird, Melvin R.

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

Marx, Groucho

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.

Amis, Kingsley

10.

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

Robert Louis Stevenson

11.

Politics is a blood sport.

Bevan, Aneurin

12.

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

13.

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

Plato

14.

Let us not forget that we can never go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.

Gaitskell, Hugh

15.

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

Adams, Henry Brooks

16.

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

17.

Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.

Rogers, Will

18.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

Nathan, George Jean

19.

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

Bolingbroke, Henry

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

Never answer a question from a farmer.

Humphrey, Hubert H.

29.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

30.

There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.

Disraeli, Benjamin

31.

Politics has less to do with where you live than where your heart is.

Margaret Cho

32.

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

33.

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.

34.

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

Jackson, Jesse

35.

There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

36.

Politics is a profession where the paths of glory lead but to the gravy.

Franklin, Billy Boy

37.

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.

38.

In argument, truth always prevails finally; in politics, falsehood always.

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

40.

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.

41.

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

Baudrillard, Jean

42.

In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.

Morley, John

43.

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

44.

The Tories in England had long imagined that they were enthusiastic about the monarchy, the church and beauties of the old English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the confession that they are enthusiastic only about rent.

Marx, Karl

45.

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

46.

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.

Asquith, Margot

47.

If you can't stand a little sacrifice and you can't stand a trip across the desert with limited water, we're never going to straighten this country out.

Perot, H. Ross

48.

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

Reagan, Ronald

49.

The work of the political activist inevitably involves a certain tension between the requirement that position be taken on current issues as they arise and the desire that one's contributions will somehow survive the ravages of time.

Davis, Angela Y.

50.

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