Quotations and Poems

» “Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
– Henry Brooks Adams

» “Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”
– Henry Brooks Adams

» “In politics the middle way is none at all.”
– John Adams

» “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.”
– Oscar Ameringer

» “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.”
– Kingsley Amis

» “Nothing is irreparable in politics.”
– Jean Anouilh

» “All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.”
– John Arbuthnot

» “Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.”
– Aristotle

» “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

» “Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.”
– Dick Armey

» “Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.”
– Paddy Ashdown

» “He could not see a belt without hitting below it.”
– Margot Asquith

» “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.”
– W. H. Auden

» “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.”
– W. H. Auden

» “It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.”
– Francis Bacon

» “A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.”
– Walter Bagehot

» “The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.”
– Walter Bagehot

» “When great questions end, little parties begin.”
– Walter Bagehot

» “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.”
– Edward C. Banfield

» “The politician is like an acrobat : he keeps his balance By saying the opposite of what he does.”
– Barres

» “It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.”
– Jean Baudrillard

» “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.”
– Jean Baudrillard

» “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.”
– Jean Baudrillard

» “The era of the political was one of anomie: crisis, violence, madness and revolution. The era of the trans-political is that of anomaly: an aberration of no consequence, contemporaneous with the event of no consequence.”
– Jean Baudrillard

» “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”
– Tony Benn

» “We are not just here to manage capitalism but to change society and to define its finer values.”
– Tony Benn

» “Yogi met George Bush during an election campaign. Bush said Texas was important. Yogi said Texas has a lot of electrical votes.”
– Yogi Berra

» “Politics is a blood sport.”
– Aneurin Bevan

» “The Prime Minister has an absolute genius for putting flamboyant labels on empty luggage.”
– Aneurin Bevan

» “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.”
– Ambrose Bierce

» “Politics is not an exact science.”
– Otto Von Bismarck

» “Politics is the art of the next best.”
– Otto Von Bismarck

» “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.”
– William Blake

» “The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.”
– Henry Bolingbroke

» “In politics, an absurdity is not a handicap.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte

» “I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.”
– George Borrow

» “The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.”
– Ben C. Bradlee

» “Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.”
– Vera Brittain

» “A passion for politics stems usually from an insatiable need, either for power, or for friendship and adulation, or a combination of both.”
– Fawn M. Brodie

» “Any established village; could afford a town drunkard, a town atheist, and a few Democrats.”
– Denis E. Brogan

» “A liberal is a man who leaves a room when the fight begins.”
– Heywood Broun

» “It doesn’t matter what I say as long as I sound different from other politicians.”
– Jerry Brown

» “I hope the two wings of the Democratic Party may flap together.”
– William Jennings Bryan

» “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.”
– James Bryce

» “A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman.”
– Edmund Burke

» “Circumstances give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind.”
– Edmund Burke

» “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.”
– Edmund Burke

» “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
– Edmund Burke

» “People say I’m indecisive, but I don’t know about that.”
– George Bush

» “A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.”
– Robert Byrne

» “I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”
– Lord Byron

» “An honest politician is one who when he is bought will stay bought.”
– W. J. Cameron

» “Politics and the fate of mankind are shaped by men without ideals and without greatness. Men who have greatness within them don’t go in for politics.”
– Albert Camus

» “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.”
– George Canning

» “Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons.”
– Joseph Cannon

» “It is a vain hope to make people happy by politics.”
– Thomas Carlyle

» “Little other than a red tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence.”
– Thomas Carlyle

» “Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul — politics does the same thing for the body.”
– Joyce Cary

» “The problem with political jokes is they get elected.”
– Henry Cate

» “Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places for believing practices. Politics has once again become religious.”
– Michel De Certeau

» “The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practice politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
– John Jay Chapman

» “Politics is organized hatred, that is unity.”
– John Jay Chapman

» “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.”
– John Jay Chapman

» “A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful.”
– John Jay Chapman

» “Half a truth is better than no politics.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “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.”
– Madame Chiang Kai-Shek

» “Politicians have the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterward to explain why it didn’t happen.”
– Winston Churchill

» “Any 20 year-old who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.”
– Winston Churchill

» “In war you can be killed only once. In politics, many times.”
– Winston Churchill

» “Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.”
– Winston Churchill

» “Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.”
– Winston Churchill

» “There are no true friends in politics. We are all sharks circling, and waiting, for traces of blood to appear in the water.”
– Alan Clark

» “A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.”
– James Freeman Clarke

» “When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn’t like it, and I didn’t inhale, and I never tried again.”
– Bill Clinton

» “You need to know that a member of Congress who refuses to allow the minimum wage to come up for a vote made more money during last year’s one-month government shutdown than a minimum wage worker makes in an entire year.”
– Bill Clinton

» “The highest political buzz word is not liberty, equality, fraternity or solidarity; it is service.”
– Arthur Hugh Clough

» “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.”
– Frank Moore Colby

» “In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.”
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge

» “What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.”
– Calvin Coolidge

» “Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.”
– James F. Cooper

» “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.”
– Ralph J. Cudworth

» “The diplomatic name for the law of the jungle.”
– Ely Culbertson

» “A politician is an ass upon which everyone has sat except a man.”
– E.E. Edward

» “Rome had Senators too, and that is why it declined.”
– Frank Dane

» “The news of any politician’s death should be listed under ”Public Improvements.””
– Frank Dane

» “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.”
– Angela Y. Davis

» “In Mexico an air conditioner is called a politician because it makes a lot of noise but doesn’t work very well.”
– Len Deighton

» “The bright old day now dawns again; the cry runs through the land, in England there shall be dear bread — in Ireland, sword and brand; and poverty, and ignorance, shall swell the rich and grand, so rally round the rulers with the gentle iron hand, of the fine old English Tory days; hail to the coming time!”
– Charles Dickens

» “There is no gambling like politics. Nothing in which the power of circumstance is more evident.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “A majority is always better than the best repartee.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “Things must be done by parties, not by persons using parties as tools.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “The art of governing mankind by deceiving them.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “No man is regular in his attendance at the House of Commons until he is married.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “In politics, nothing is contemptible.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “Finality is not the language of politics.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “A Conservative government is an organized hypocrisy.”
– Benjamin Disraeli

» “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

» “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

» “Elected leaders who forget how they got there won’t the next time.”
– 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

» “Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith

» “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
– John Kenneth Galbraith

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

» “I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.”
– Charles De Gaulle

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

» “It’s a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president… except me.”
– Barry Goldwater

» “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

» “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

» “I do not look for much to come out of government ownership as long as we have Democrats and Republicans.”
– Kin Hubbard

» “Politics makes strange postmasters.”
– Kin Hubbard

» “If there is anything a public servant hates to do it is something for the public.”
– Kin Hubbard

» “Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature.”
– Kin Hubbard

» “A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.”
– Hubert H. Humphrey

» “Never answer a question from a farmer.”
– Hubert H. Humphrey

» “The essence of statesmanship is not a rigid adherence to the past, but a prudent and probing concern for the future.”
– Hubert H. Humphrey

» “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

» “Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.”
– 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

» “Politics are such a torment that I would advise every one I love not to mix with them.”
– Thomas Jefferson

» “When a man assumes a public trust he should consider himself a public property.”
– Thomas Jefferson

» “If you’re I politics and you can’t tell when you walk into a room who’s for you and who’s against you, then you’re in the wrong line of work.”
– Lyndon B. Johnson

» “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

» “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

» “Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.”
– John F. Kennedy

» “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build A bridge even where there is no river.”
– Nikita Khrushchev

» “If it’s going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.”
– Henry Kissinger

» “Ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.”
– 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

» “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 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 naïve 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

» “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

» “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 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

» “Politics doesn’t make strange bedfellows, marriage does.”
– Groucho 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

» “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

» “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

» “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

» “A man who is a politician at forty is a statesman at three score and ten. It is at this age, when he would be too old to be a clerk or a gardener or a police-court magistrate, that he is ripe to govern a country.”
– W. Somerset Maugham

» “It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.”
– W. Somerset Maugham

» “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.”
– Eugene J. Mccarthy

» “It is dangerous for a national candidate to say things that people might remember.”
– Eugene J. Mccarthy

» “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.”
– Eugene J. Mccarthy

» “In politics, it seems, retreat is honorable if dictated by military considerations and shameful if even suggested for ethical reasons.”
– Mary Mccarthy

» “Politics is the enemy of the imagination.”
– Ian Mcewan

» “Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be.”
– Marshall Mcluhan

» “A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “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.”
– H. L. Mencken

» “A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.”
– John Stuart Mill

» “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.”
– Henry Miller

» “Although he’s regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.”
– George J. Mitchell

» “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.”
– Walter F. Mondale

» “Hell hath no fury like a crooked politician denied his cut.”
– Benjamin J. Montalbano

» “In politics the choice is constantly between two evils.”
– John Morley

» “We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.”
– Hector Hugh Munro

» “When you’ve got them by their wallets, their hearts and minds will follow.”
– Fern Naito

» “The Empress is legitimate, my cousin is Republican, Morny is Orleanist, I am a socialist; the only Bonapartist is Persigny, and he is mad.”
– Napoleon III

» “Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.”
– George Jean Nathan

» “I am not a crook.”
– Richard M. Nixon

» “I played by the rules of politics as I found them.”
– Richard M. Nixon

» “The one thing sure about politics is that what goes up comes down and what goes down often comes up.”
– Richard M. Nixon

» “It is far easier for the proverbial camel to pass through the needle’s eye, hump and all, than for an erstwhile colonial administration to give sound and honest counsel of a political nature to its liberated territory.”
– Kwame Nkrumah

» “Don’t fall in love with politicians, they’re all a disappointment. They can’t help it, they just are.”
– Peggy Noonan

» “Sincerity and competence is a strong combination. In politics, it is everything.”
– Peggy Noonan

» “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.”
– Peggy Noonan

» “The right man, in the right place, at the right time, can steal millions.”
– Gregory Nunn

» “You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.”
– Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

» “Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
– George Orwell

» “Politics is the science of urgencies.”
– Theodore Parker

» “In politics people give you what they think you deserve and deny you what they think you want.”
– Cecil Parkinson

» “People who leave Washington do so by way of the box… ballet or coffin.”
– Claiborne Pell

» “The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they’ve been appointed and thinking they’ve been anointed.”
– Claude D. Pepper

» “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.”
– H. Ross Perot

» “Political success is the ability, when the inevitable occurs, to get credit for it.”
– Laurence J. Peter

» “Politician: From the Greek ”poly” (”many”) and the French ”tête” (”head” or ”face,” as in ”tête-à-tête”: head to head or face to face). Hence”
– Martin Pitt

» “To speak on without saying anything has always been the greatest gift of orators.”
– Platen

» “The heaviest penalty for deciding to engage in politics is to be ruled by someone inferior to yourself.”
– Plato

» “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

» “I find myself… hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.”
– Alexander Pope

» “Legislators: Rape their wives and do two years. Kill their children and do five years. Steal their money and kiss your ass goodbye.”
– L. R. Powell

» “Let me just tell you how thrilling it really is, and how, what a challenge it is, because in 1988 the question is whether we’re going forward to tomorrow or whether we’re going to go past to the back!”
– Dan Quayle

» “People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history.”
– Dan Quayle

» “Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.”
– Dan Quayle

» “Politicians are people who, when they see light at the end of the tunnel, go out and buy some more tunnel.”
– John Quinton

» “Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close.”
– Ronald Reagan

» “Republicans believe every day is the Fourth of July, but the democrats believe every day is April 15.”
– Ronald Reagan

» “Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.”
– Ronald Reagan

» “It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.”
– Ronald Reagan

» “Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.”
– Ronald Reagan

» “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.”
– Adrienne Rich

» “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.”
– Elliot Richardson

» “What in fact takes place in an election is that two hand picked candidates are propped up before the citizenry, each candidate having been selected by a very small group of politically active people. A minority of the people… then elects one of these hand picked people to rule itself and the majority.”
– Robert J. Ringer

» “In politics a straight line is the shortest distance to disaster.”
– John P. Roche

» “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.”
– Will Rogers

» “There is no more independence in politics than there is in jail.”
– Will Rogers

» “The trouble with practical jokes is that very often they get elected.”
– Will Rogers

» “The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.”
– Will Rogers

» “I tell you folks, all politics is applesauce.”
– Will Rogers

» “The more you read and observe about this politics thing, the more you’ve got to admit that each party’s worse than the other. The one that’s out always looks the best.”
– Will Rogers

» “I’m not a member of any organized political party, I’m a Democrat!”
– Will Rogers

» “No party is as bad as its leaders.”
– Will Rogers

» “Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.”
– Will Rogers

» “Politics is not worrying this country one-tenth as much as where to find a parking space.”
– Will Rogers

» “A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted in the air.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

» “No political party has exclusive patent rights on prosperity.”
– Franklin D. Roosevelt

» “The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

» “The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.”
– Theodore Roosevelt

» “When they call the roll in the Senate, the senators do not know whether to answer ”present” or ”not guilty.””
– Theodore Roosevelt

» “Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).”
– Harold Rosenberg

» “In order to remain true to oneself one ought to renounce one’s party three times a day.”
– Jean Rostand

» “In politics, yesterday’s lie is attacked only to flatter today’s.”
– Jean Rostand

» “We have never yet had a labor Government that knew what taking power really means; they always act like second-class citizens.”
– Dora Russell

» “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.”
– William Safire

» “The courts of kings are full of people, but empty of friends.”
– Seneca

» “A politician is one that would circumvent God.”
– William Shakespeare

» “Get thee glass eyes, and like a scurvy politician, seem to see the things thou dost not.”
– William Shakespeare

» “There have been many great men that have flattered the people who never loved them.”
– William Shakespeare

» “We mustn’t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “If I was forced to choose between the penitentiary and White House for four years, I would say the penitentiary, thank you.”
– William T. Sherman

» “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.”
– Socrates

» “We mean by ”politics” the people’s business — the most important business there is.”
– Adlai E. Stevenson

» “A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.”
– Adlai E. Stevenson

» “Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.”
– Adlai E. Stevenson

» “Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”
– Robert Louis Stevenson

» “The two maxims of any great man at court are, always to keep his countenance and never to keep his work.”
– Jonathan Swift

» “Politics, when I am in it, it makes me sick.”
– William Howard Taft

» “I am in politics because of the conflict between good and evil, and I believe that in the end good will triumph.”
– Margaret Thatcher

» “Politics is the gizzard of society, full of gut and gravel.”
– Henry David Thoreau

» “In politics… shared hatreds are almost always the basis of friendships.”
– Alexis De Tocqueville

» “Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working Americans. It is the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.”
– Lily Tomlin

» “You are pitiful isolated individuals; you are bankrupts; your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on — into the dustbin of history!”
– Leon Trotsky

» “The essential ingredient in politics is timing.”
– Pierre Elliott Trudeau

» “A politician is a man who understands government and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for fifteen years.”
– Harry S. Truman

» “It takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who’s been dead for fifteen years.”
– Harry S. Truman

» “When a leader is in the Democratic Party he is a boss, and when he is in the Republican Party he is a leader.”
– Harry S. Truman

» “Within the first few months I discovered that being president is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep riding or be swallowed.”
– Harry S. Truman

» “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.”
– Mark Twain

» “Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.”
– Mark Twain

» “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
– Mark Twain

» “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?”
– Mark Twain

» “I don’t care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating.”
– Boss Tweed

» “Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
– Source Unknown

» “The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.”
– Source Unknown

» “Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.”
– Source Unknown

» “Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.”
– Source Unknown

» “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.”
– Source Unknown

» “A recent survey was said to prove that the people we Americans most admire are our politicians and doctors. I don’t believe it. They are simply the people we are most afraid of. And with the most reason.”
– Source Unknown

» “Until you’ve been in politics you’ve never really been alive; it’s rough and sometimes it’s dirty and it’s always hard work and tedious details. But, it’s the only sport for grown-ups all other games are for kids.”
– Source Unknown

» “He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.”
– Queen Victoria

» “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.”
– Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

» “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.”
– Michio Watanabe

» “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.”
– Auberon Waugh

» “One can say that three pre-eminent qualities are decisive for the politician: passion, a feeling of responsibility, and a sense of proportion.”
– Max Weber

» “Only he has the calling for politics who is sure that he will not crumble when the world from his point of view is too stupid or base for what he wants to offer. Only he who in the face of all this can say ”In spite of all!” has the calling for politics.”
– Max Weber

» “Only very intelligent people don’t wish they were in politics, and I’m dumb enough to want to be in there.”
– Orson Welles

» “A candidate could easily commit political suicide if he were to come up with an unconventional thought during a presidential tour.”
– E(lwyn) B(rooks) White

» “Only people who look dull ever get into the House of Commons, and only people who are dull ever succeed there.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don’t talk politics.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “He thinks like a Tory, and talks like a Radical, and that’s so important nowadays.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “A politician’s words reveal less about what he thinks about his subject than what he thinks about his audience.”
– George F. Will

» “All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are ”up to a point.””
– George F. Will

» “Politics should share one purpose with religion: the steady emancipation of the individual through the education of his passions.”
– George F. Will

» “This Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.”
– Harold Wilson

» “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.”
– Woodrow T. Wilson

» “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.”
– Mao Zedong