Motivational Quotes

Politics

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

- Will Rogers

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Fischer, John

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.

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

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus

In politics... never retreat, never retract... never admit a mistake.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

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

Bevan, Aneurin

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

Prosperity is necessarily the first theme of a political campaign.

Wilson, Woodrow T.

A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.

White, Elwyn Brooks

Whether elected or appointed he considers himself the Lord's anointed, and indeed the ointment lingers on him so thick you can't get your fingers on him.

Nash, Ogden

10.

The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.

Barres

11.

Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul -- politics does the same thing for the body.

Cary, Joyce

12.

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

Roosevelt, Franklin D.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they've been appointed and thinking they've been anointed.

Pepper, Claude D.

16.

You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don't know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God's curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wives and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.

Henley, Anthony

17.

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

18.

Cant is always rather nauseating; but before we condemn political hypocrisy, let us remember that it is the tribute paid by men of leather to men of God, and that the acting of the part of someone better than oneself may actually commit one to a course of behavior perceptibly less evil than what would be normal and natural in an avowed cynic.

Huxley, Aldous

19.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

20.

This country has gotten where it is in spite of politics, not by the aid of it. That we have carried as much political bunk as we have and still survived shows we are a super nation.

Rogers, Will

21.

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Twain, Mark

22.

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

23.

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.

24.

In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.

Mccarthy, Mary

25.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

Lester B. Pearson

26.

Political image is like mixing cement. When it's wet, you can move it around and shape it, but at some point it hardens and there's almost nothing you can do to reshape it.

Mondale, Walter F.

27.

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

Kissinger, Henry

28.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

Bierce, Ambrose

29.

Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.

Huxley, Aldous

30.

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

Truman, Harry S

31.

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

Jackson, Jesse

32.

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

33.

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

Brown, Jerry

34.

A majority is always better than the best repartee.

Disraeli, Benjamin

35.

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

Kocher, Gerhard

36.

Nothing is irreparable in politics.

Anouilh, Jean

37.

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

38.

Away with the cant of Measures, not men! -- the idle supposition that it is the harness and not the horses that draw the chariot along. No, Sir, if the comparison must be made, if the distinction must be taken, men are everything, measures comparatively nothing.

Canning, George

39.

At home you always have to be a politician. When you're abroad you almost feel yourself a statesman.

Macmillan, Harold

40.

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

Franklin, Benjamin

41.

We mean by politics the people's business -- the most important business there is.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

42.

Politics makes strange postmasters.

Hubbard, Kin

43.

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

44.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

45.

Politics has never been for the thin-skinned or the faint of heart, and if you enter the arena , you should expect to get roughed up. Moreover, Democracy in a nation of more than 300 million people is inherently difficult.

President Barack Obama

46.

To rely upon conviction, devotion, and other excellent spiritual qualities -- that is not to be taken seriously in politics.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich

47.

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

48.

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

49.

Politics is the science of urgencies.

Parker, Theodore

50.

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

Rinehart, Dana Gillman