Motivational Quotes

Politics

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

Best Quotes about Politics

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

Rostand, Jean

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Ambrose Bierce

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don't acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Vonnegut Jr., Kurt

Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.

Quinton, John

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

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

Lavater, Johann Kaspar

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

Maugham, W. Somerset

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

Brown, Jerry

People say I'm indecisive, but I don't know about that.

Bush, George

10.

A politician is one that would circumvent God.

Shakespeare, William

11.

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

Roosevelt, Theodore

12.

The ordinary politician has a very low estimate of human nature. In his daily life he comes into contact chiefly with persons who want to get something or to avoid something. Beyond this circle of seekers after privileges, individuals and organized minorities, he is aware of a large unorganized, indifferent mass of citizens who ask nothing in particular and rarely complain. The politician comes after a while to think that the art of politics is to satisfy the seekers after favors and to mollify the inchoate mass with noble sentiments and patriotic phrases.

Lippmann, Walter

13.

A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.

Clarke, James Freeman

14.

Politicians say they're beefing up our economy. Most don't know beef from pork.

Lowman, Hariold

15.

You slam a politician, you make out he's the devil, with horns and hoofs. But his wife loves him, and so did all his mistresses.

Johnson, Pamela Hansford

16.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

18.

Nothing is so foolish, they say, as for a man to stand for office and woo the crowd to win its vote, buy its support with presents, court the applause of all those fools and feel self-satisfied when they cry their approval, and then in his hour of triumph to be carried round like an effigy for the public to stare at, and end up cast in bronze to stand in the market place.

Erasmus, Desiderius

19.

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.

20.

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

Kennedy, Joseph

21.

If American politics does not look to you like a joke, a tragic dance; if you have enough blindness left in you, on any plea, on any excuse, to vote for the Democratic Party or the Republican Party (for at present machine and party are one), or for any candidate who does not stand for a new era, -- then you yourself pass into the slide of the magic-lantern; you are an exhibit, a quaint product, a curiosity of the American soil. You are part of the problem.

Chapman, John Jay

22.

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

Nixon, Richard M.

23.

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

24.

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

25.

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

Margaret Cho

26.

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Stevenson, Adlai E.

27.

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

Greenfield, Meg

28.

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

Noonan, Peggy

29.

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

Noonan, Peggy

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.

The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.

Rogers, Will

32.

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

Tocqueville, Alexis De

33.

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

34.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Cooper, James F.

35.

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

36.

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

Taft, William Howard

37.

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

Bagehot, Walter

38.

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

Landor, Walter Savage

39.

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

Jefferson, Thomas

40.

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

Heine, Heinrich

41.

Few businessmen are capable of being in politics, they don't understand the democratic process, they have neither the tolerance or the depth it takes. Democracy isn't a business.

Forbes, Malcolm S.

42.

The word'politics'is derived from the word'poly', meaning'many', and the word'ticks', meaning'blood sucking parasites'.

Larry Hardiman

43.

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

44.

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.

45.

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

Alfred E. Newman

46.

In politics the middle way is none at all.

Adams, John

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.

Banfield, Edward C.