Politics Quotes
Most popular politics quotes
![... a tradition [to politics] based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done. - Barack Obama quote.](/img/q/71/871A--a-tradition-to-politics-based-simple-idea-that-we-barack-obama.png)
... a tradition [to politics] based on the simple idea that we have a stake in one another, and that what binds us together is greater than what drives us apart, and that if enough people believe in the truth of that proposition and act on it, then we might not solve every problem, but we can get something meaningful done.
No, what's troubling is the gap between the magnitude of our challenges and the smallness of our politics—the ease with which we are distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our seeming inability to build a working consensus to tackle any big problem.
It should be possible both to believe deeply in the rightness of one's own cause and to hear out the other side.
First, politics is the process by which we in a democracy create laws from our beliefs. Second, politics is the process of determining who gets how much of the whats, whens, wheres, and hows in five areas: income, education, health care, housing, and justice.
Politics is not an exact science.
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
Man is by nature a political animal.
The best politics is right action.
Politics is a noble activity. We should revalue it, practice it with vocation and a dedication that requires testimony, martyrdom — that is, to die for the common good.
Where opinions, morals and politics are concerned, there is no such thing as objectivity. The best we can hope for is that freedom will enable subjective points of view to meet and complement each other.
In politics, what begins in fear usually ends in folly.
The bedfellows politics makes are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.
Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with nowadays.
Politics is like coaching a football team. You have to be smart enough to understand the game but not smart enough to lose interest.
No man should enter politics unless he is either independently rich or independently poor.
Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.
What's real in politics is what the voters decide is real.
Politics are too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
When the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power.
When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.
It's extremely difficult to build a political platform that supports candidates without holding up taxpayers.
Politics is the art of getting money from the rich and votes from the poor, with the pretext of protecting one from the other.
Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party.
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
A radical is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air.
Oil is seldom found where it is most needed, and seldom most needed where it is found.
Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
If a man is right, he can't be too radical; if he is wrong, he can't be too conservative.
You can't divorce religious belief and public service I've never detected any conflict between God's will and my political duty. If you violate one, you violate the other.
In politics stupidity is not a handicap.
Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.
The fact is that a reformer can't last in politics. He can make a show for a while, but he always comes down like a rocket. Politics is as much a regular business as the grocery or the dry-goods or the drug business.
In politics there is no honor.
Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
I seldom think of politics more than eighteen hours a day.
If you take yourself seriously in politics, you've had it.
Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once. But in politics many times.
Politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
An independent is the guy who wants to take the politics out of politics.
The middle of the road is all of the usable surface. The extremes, right and left, are in the gutters.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
In politics, as in other things, there is no such thing as one getting something for nothing. The payoff may involve compromises of various types that may strike at the ideals and principles one has held dear all his life.
I have sometimes looked with wonder on the jargon of our times, wherein those whose minds reside in the past are called "progressive," while those whose minds are vital enough to challenge and mould the future are dubbed "reactionary."
When political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is wheeled into action.
If I seem to take part in politics, it is only because politics encircle us today like the coil of a snake from which one cannot get out, no matter how much one tries. I wish therefore to wrestle with the snake.
I've always thought that the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing.
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.
In politics, a mind can be a terrible thing to change.
To wear your heart on your sleeve isn't a very good plan. You should wear it inside, where it functions best.
We must rid ourselves of the view that only logical ideas can be political weapons. Ideas in politics are much like poetry; they need no inner logical structure to be effective.
Money is the mother's milk of politics.
Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion.
The idea that you can merchandize candidates for high office like breakfast cereal—that you can gather votes like box tops—is, I think, the ultimate indignity of the political process.
In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace that, a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
I have the most reliable friend that you can have in American politics—ready money.
The definition of happiness of the Greeks...is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.
I brought myself down. I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I had been in their position, I'd have done the same thing.
I played by the rules of politics as I found them. Not taking a higher road than my predecessors and my adversaries was my central mistake.
Women were trained to speak softly...and carry a lipstick. Now we demanded a bigger stick. We want to be everywhere, at every table.
Modern politics is, at bottom, a struggle not of men but of forces.
A man must be excessively stupid, as well as uncharitable, who believes there is no virtue but on his own side, and that there are not men as honest as himself who may differ from him in political principles.
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.
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
Professional politics is a trade in which the sly outweigh the wise.
Politics is a blood sport.
Politics, n. A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Politics is the art of the possible.
Politics is not just about voting one day every four years. Politics is the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the road we walk on.
Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.
Politics is not really politics any more. It is run, for the most part, by Madison Avenue advertising firms, who sell politicians to the public the way they sell bars of soap or cans of beer.
Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul—politics does the same thing for the body.
The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of old policies.
My present attitude toward politics as it is practiced in the United States: it is a beautiful fraud.
Politics is the womb in which war develops—where its outlines already exist in their hidden rudimentary form, like the characteristics of living creatures in their embryos.
The pursuit of politics is religion, morality, and poetry all in one.
Finality is not the language of politics.
All politics is global.
Few things are as immutable as the addiction of political groups to the ideas by which they have won office.
Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
To me the function of politics is to make possible the desirable.
We are making politics a spectator sport in which our only duty is to vote somebody into office and then retire to the grandstands.
I can only say that politics, like misery, 'bring a man acquainted with strange bedfellows.'
Political genius consists in identifying oneself with a principle.
Politics I would rather not be quoted on. All the contact I have had with it has left me feeling as though I had been drinking out of spittoons.
Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power.
There is no sea more dangerous than the ocean of practical politics—none in which there is more need of good pilotage and of a single, unfaltering purpose when the waves rise again.
I believe politics is the finest form of entertainment in the state of Texas: better than the zoo, better than the circus, rougher than football, and even more aesthetically satisfying than baseball. Becoming a fan of this arcane art form will yield a body endless joy—besides, they make you pay for it whether you pay attention or not.
Politics is like having diabetes.
Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything—high and low and, most especially, high—lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away.
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.
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.
Politics is war without bloodshed; war is politics with bloodshed.
Being in politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game and dumb enough to think it's important.
Ideas are great arrows, but there has to be a bow. And politics is the bow of idealism.
Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of man.
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
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.
The politics of our society are a conversation in which past, present, and future each has a voice; and though one or other of them may on occasion properly prevail none permanently dominates, and on this account we are free.
The nature of not only politics but, I think, social change of any sort is that it doesn't move in a straight line, and that those who are most successful typically are tacking like a sailor toward a particular direction.
All politics is local.
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.
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.
Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
If you ever injected truth into politics you'd have no politics.
Ceremony, circus, farce, melodrama, tragedy...nothing else offers all at once the whirl, the excitement, the gaiety, the intrigue, and the anguish.
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
Politics in the middle of things that concern the imagination is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert.
As in economics, so to in G.O.P. politics; Gresham's law applies. Bad money drives out good. Bad Republicans drive out good ones. When nastiness sells, the worst rise.
Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society—full of grit & gravel.
The choice in politics isn't usually between black and white. It is between two horrible shades of grey.
Criticizing a political satirist for being unfair is like criticizing a 260-pound noseguard for being physical.
The essential ingredient of politics is timing.
Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.
Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life's gymnasium.
All politics takes place on a slippery slope. The most important four words in politics are "up to a point."
A friend of mine says that every man who takes office in Washington either grew or swelled, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is swelling or growing.
Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.
We should beware of the demagogues who are willing to declare a trade war against our friends, weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world, all while cynically waving the American flag.
Politics is a science. You can demonstrate that you are right and that others are wrong.
All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field.
All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
Before you can begin to think about politics at all, you have to abandon the notion that there is a war between good men and bad men.
Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?
Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.
I am working for the time when unqualified blacks, browns, and women join the unqualified men in running our government.
I have come to the conclusion that politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.
I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.
I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.
If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.
If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn't be any inducement to go to heaven.
It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.
One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy. You cannot speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark, its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time to time, one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase—some jackboot, Achilles' heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse—into the dustbin where it belongs.
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavour to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyse what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
Politics—I don't know why, but they seem to have a tendency to separate us, to keep us from one another, while nature is always and ever making efforts to bring us together.
Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy.
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.
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
Politics, n: Poly ['many'] + tics ['blood-sucking parasites']
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.
Take our politicians: they're a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.
The Christian Right is neither.
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal—that you can gather votes like box tops—is ... the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
The imbecility of men is always inviting the impudence of power.
The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.
The qualities that get a man into power are not those that lead him, once established, to use power wisely.
There are far too many men in politics and not enough elsewhere.
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
There are only two great currents in the history of mankind: the baseness which makes conservatives and the envy which makes revolutionaries.
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.
We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
One of the most pathetic—and dangerous—signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason.
The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty. That is why term limits should make it impossible to have a whole career in politics.
The only valid political system is one that can handle an imbecile in power without suffering from it.
