Politics Quotes

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

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

John Quinton

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

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

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 McCarthy

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.

Ogden Nash

Nothing is so abject and pathetic as a politician who has lost his job, save only a retired stud-horse.

H. L. Mencken

What we need in appointive positions are men of knowledge and experience with sufficient character to resist temptations.

Calvin Coolidge

The newspaper reader says: this party will ruin itself if it makes errors like this. My higher politics says: a party which makes errors like this is already finished -- it is no longer secure in its instincts.

Friedrich Nietzsche

It's called political economy because it is has nothing to do with either politics or economy.

Stephen Leacock

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

Only very intelligent people don't wish they were in politics, and I'm dumb enough to want to be in there.

Orson Welles

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

Nothing can be said about our politics that has not already been said about hemorrhoids.

Source Unknown

The most difficult choice a politician must ever make is whether to be a hypocrite or a liar.

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

Politicians should never put themselves first: governments should put people first and all of us should put our country first.

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

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 an ancient political vehicle, held together by soft soap and hunger and with front-seat drivers and back-seat drivers contradicting each other in a bedlam of voices, shouting

Adlai Stevenson, On the Republic