Quotes about politics

Politic is going to be diluted down into a ten second window, where you whack the guy as hard as you can and then get out there.

— Alan Dixon

Resolved to ruin or to rule the state.

— John Dryden

It is our experience that political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.

— Abba Eban

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.

— Barbara Ehrenreich

An empty stomach is not a good political advisor.

— Albert Einstein

Politics is far more complicated than physics.

— Albert Einstein

Unlike presidential administrations, problems rarely have terminal dates.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

There is a certain satisfaction in coming down to the lowest ground of politics, for we get rid of cant and hypocrisy.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Hans Magnus Enzensberger

As far as the men who are running for president are concerned, they aren't even people I would date.

— Nora Ephron

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.

— Desiderius Erasmus

The house of Lords is a model on how to care for the elderly.

— Franklin Field

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

— John Fischer

Elected leaders who forget how they got there won't the next time.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

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.

— Malcolm S. Forbes

The first mistake in public business is going into it.

— Benjamin Franklin

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

— Billy Boy Franklin

A politician divides mankind into two classes; tools and enemies.

— Fredrich

The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.

— French National Assembly

The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

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

— Hugh Gaitskell

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

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

— John Kenneth Galbraith

There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.

— John Galsworthy

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.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him.

— Charles De Gaulle

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

— Charles De Gaulle

What do you want to be a sailor for? There are greater storms in politics than you will ever find at sea. Piracy, broadsides, blood on the decks. You will find them all in politics.

— David Lloyd George

In politics, as on the sickbed, people toss from side to side, thinking they will be more comfortable.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Politics is the reflex of the business and industrial world.

— Emma Goldman

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

— Emma Goldman

If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.

— Barry Goldwater

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

— Barry Goldwater

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

— Mikhail Gorbachev

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

— Amy Grant

I never said all Democrats were saloonkeepers; what I said was all saloonkeepers are Democrats.

— Horace Greeley

Ninety percent of politics is deciding whom to blame.

— Meg Greenfield

Ignorance makes most men go into a political party, and shame keeps them from getting out of it.

— Edward F. Halifax

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

— Roy Hattersley

He serves his party best who serves his country best.

— Rutherford B. Hayes

A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer -- that is, a coward to both sides of the question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man, but is a sort of whiffing, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.

— William Hazlitt

A politician will do anything to keep his job, even become a patriot.

— William Randolph Hearst

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.

— Edward Heath

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

— Heinrich Heine

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.

— Anthony Henley

Politics is like a race horse. A good jockey must know how to fall with the least possible damage.

— Edouard Herriot

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

— George V. Higgins

Politics is the profession of those who have neither trade nor art.

— Muhammad Hijazi

One wanders to the left, another to the right. Both are equally in error, but, are seduced by different delusions.

— Horace

Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.

— Kin Hubbard

Politics makes strange postmasters.

— Kin Hubbard

I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.

— Kin Hubbard

If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.

— Kin Hubbard

The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

Never answer a question from a farmer.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

— Hubert H. Humphrey

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

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Aldous Huxley

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.

— Thomas H. Huxley

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

— Jesse Jackson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

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

— Thomas Jefferson

Son, in politics you've got to learn that overnight chicken shit can turn to chicken salad.

— Lyndon B. Johnson

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.

— Pamela Hansford Johnson

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.

— Samuel Johnson

It is the eternal truth in the political as well as the mystical body, that, where one members suffers, all the members suffer with it.

— Junius

A political convention is not a place where you can come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

— Murray Kempton

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.

— John F. Kennedy Jr.

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.

— John F. Kennedy

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

— Joseph Kennedy

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.

— John F. Kennedy

Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build A bridge even where there is no river.

— Nikita Khrushchev

Democrats can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

— Jeane Kirkpatrick

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

— Henry Kissinger

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

— Henry Kissinger

Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.

— Arthur Koestler

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

— Melvin R. Laird

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

— Walter Savage Landor

What this country needs is more unemployed politicians.

— Edward Langley

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

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

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

— Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

It is hard to say why politicians are called servants, unless it is because a good one is hard to find.

— Gerald F. Lieberman

Honest statesmanship is the wise employment of individual meanness for the public good.

— Abraham Lincoln

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.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

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.

— Walter Lippmann

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

— Hariold Lowman

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.

— Lord Macaulay

As usual the Liberals offer a mixture of sound and original ideas. Unfortunately none of the sound ideas is original and none of the original ideas is sound.

— Harold Macmillan

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

— Harold Macmillan

The politician who never made a mistake never made a decision.

— John Major

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.

— John Major

Did you ever notice that when a politician does get an idea he usually gets it all wrong.

— Don Marquis

Politics doesn't make strange bedfellows, marriage does.

— Groucho Marx

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.

— Karl Marx

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.

— Karl Marx

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.

— Karl Marx

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.

— Karl Marx