Politics Quotes

• Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

  Lord Acton

• He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

  Henry B. Adams

• In politics the middle way is none at all.

  John Adams

• Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.

  John Quincy Adams

• Confronted with the choice, the American people would choose the policeman's truncheon over the anarchist's bomb.

  Spiro T. Agnew

• Reporters thrive on the world's misfortune. For this reason they often take an indecent pleasure in events that dismay the rest of humanity.

  Russell Baker

• The beef industry has contributed to more American deaths than all the wars of this century, all natural disasters, and all automobile accidents combined.

  Neal Barnard

• Vote for the man who promises least; he'll be the least disappointing.

  Bernard Baruch

• A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.

  Leonard Bernstein

• Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.

  Lewis Black

• He who knows how to flatter also knows how to slander.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

• I love power. But it is as an artist that I love it. I love it as a musician loves his violin, to draw out its sounds and chords and harmonies.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

• As you make your bed, so you must lie in it.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

• Freedom means the opportunity to be what we never thought we would be.

  Daniel J. Boorstin

• If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable.

  Louis D. Brandeis

• The most important political office is that of the private citizen.

  Louis D. Brandeis

• When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

  Edmund Burke

• The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.

  Dante Alighieri

• The secret of getting things done is to act!

  Dante Alighieri

• Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

  Aristotle

• Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.

  Richard Armour

• So long as we have enough people in this country willing to fight for their rights, we'll be called a democracy.

  Roger Nash Baldwin

• Conservative, n: A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others.

  Ambrose Bierce

• Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.

  Ambrose Bierce

• The revenues of Cuban state-run companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong.

  Fidel Castro

• The revolution is a dictatorship of the exploited against the exploiters.

  Fidel Castro

• Television is democracy at its ugliest.

  Paddy Chayefsky

• If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

  Noam Chomsky

• We didn't actually overspend our budget. The health Commission allocation simply fell short of our expenditure.

  Frank Howard Clark

• Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by man and woman in the working out of our civilization were assigned long ago by a higher intelligence than ours.

  Grover Cleveland

• Free speech is not to be regulated like diseased cattle and impure butter. The audience that hissed yesterday may applaud today, even for the same performance.

  William O. Douglas

• The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

  John Foster Dulles

• Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.

  Robert Byrne

• Republicans are men of narrow vision, who are afraid of the future.

  Jimmy Carter

• Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

• If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

  Winston Churchill

• Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

  Winston Churchill

• I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected President but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.

  Arthur C. Clarke

• When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I'm beginning to believe it.

  Clarence Darrow

• Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.

  Robertson Davies

• In politics nothing is contemptible.

  Benjamin Disraeli

• Oh, that lovely title, ex-president.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

• If the United Nations is a country unto itself, then the commodity it exports most is words.

  Esther B. Fein

• Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.

  W. C. Fields

• In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

  J. William Fulbright

• Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

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

  R. Buckminster Fuller

• Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

• Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

• The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

  John Kenneth Galbraith

• Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned.

  Milton Friedman

• The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.

  Erich Fromm

• It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of nonviolence to cover impotence.

  Mohandas Gandhi

• For every talent that poverty has stimulated it has blighted a hundred.

  John W. Gardner

• When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.

  John W. Gardner

• In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.

  Charles de Gaulle

• In politics it is necessary either to betray one's country or the electorate. I prefer to betray the electorate.

  Charles de Gaulle

• Politics is too serious a matter to be left to the politicians.

  Charles de Gaulle

• Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

  Kahlil Gibran

• Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.

  William E. Gladstone

• An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.

  Arnold H. Glasow

• If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

  Emma Goldman

• No real social change has ever been brought about without a revolution... revolution is but thought carried into action.

  Emma Goldman

• I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

  Barry Goldwater

• We're all capable of mistakes, but I do not care to enlighten you on the mistakes we may or may not have made.

  Al Gore

• 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.

  Meg Greenfield

• I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.

  William Gilbert

• Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.

  Newt Gingrich

• Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.

  Alexander Hamilton

• You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt.

  Daniel Hannan

• The thing I enjoyed most were visits from children. They did not want public office.

  Herbert Hoover

• We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.

  Kin Hubbard

• Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.

  Thomas Jefferson

• I was a woman in a man's world. I was a Democrat in a Republican administration. I was an intellectual in a world of bureaucrats. I talked differently. This may have made me a bit like an ink blot.

  Jeane Kirkpatrick

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

  Henry A. Kissinger

• I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

  Edward Koch

• If you don't like the President, it costs you 90 bucks to fly to Washington to picket. If you don't like the Governor, it costs you 60 bucks to fly to Albany to picket. If you don't like me, 90 cents.

  Edward Koch

• Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.

  Doug Larson

• Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.

  A. J. Liebling

• The politicians were talking themselves red, white and blue in the face.

  Clare Boothe Luce

• They say women talk too much. If you have worked in Congress you know that the filibuster was invented by men.

  Clare Boothe Luce

• Politics is war without bloodshed, while war is politics with bloodshed.

  Mao Tse-Tung

• In most places in the country, voting is looked upon as a right and a duty, but in Chicago it's a sport.

  Dick Gregory

• We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

  Martin L. Gross

• I think there is one higher office than president and I would call that patriot.

  Gary Hart

• I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.

  Thomas Jefferson

• Every politician should have been born an orphan and remain a bachelor.

  Lady Bird Johnson

• Frankly, I don't mind not being President. I just mind that someone else is.

  Edward Kennedy

• My brother Bob doesn't want to be in government - he promised Dad he'd go straight.

  John F. Kennedy

• Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

  Robert Kennedy

• The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too.

  Oscar Levant

• It has been well said that a hungry man is more interested in four sandwiches than four freedoms.

  Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.

• Many politicians are in the habit of laying 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.

  Thomas B. Macaulay

• 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.

  George MacDonald

• Politics have no relation to morals.

  Niccolo Machiavelli

• If the United States of America or Britain is having elections, they don't ask for observers from Africa or from Asia. But when we have elections, they want observers.

  Nelson Mandela

• When they see me holding fish, they can see that I am comfortable with kings as well as with paupers.

  Imelda Marcos

• In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.

  H. L. Mencken

• The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

  H. L. Mencken

• Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

  John Stuart Mill

• The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

  John Stuart Mill

• You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

  John Morley

• You better take advantage of the good cigars. You don't get much else in that job.

  Thomas P. O'Neill

• 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.

  P. J. O'Rourke

• The good news is that, according to the Obama administration, the rich will pay for everything. The bad news is that, according to the Obama administration, you're rich.

  P. J. O'Rourke

• When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators.

  P. J. O'Rourke

• Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?

  Robert Orben

• 'Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.

  Thomas Paine

• Radical changes in world politics leave America with a heightened responsibility to be, for the world, an example of a genuinely free, democratic, just and humane society.

  Pope John Paul II

• I think it's a terrible shame that politics has become show business.

  Sydney Pollack

• El Salvador is a democracy so it's not surprising that there are many voices to be heard here. Yet in my conversations with Salvadorans... I have heard a single voice.

  Dan Quayle

• I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy - but that could change.

  Dan Quayle

• I deserve respect for the things I did not do.

  Dan Quayle

• I do have a political agenda. It's to have as few regulations as possible.

  Dan Quayle

• I have a very good family. I'm very fortunate to have a very good family. I believe very strongly in the family. It's one of the things we have in our platform, is to talk about it.

  Dan Quayle

• I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future.

  Dan Quayle

• I just don't believe in the basic concept that someone should make their whole career in public service.

  Dan Quayle

• I love California, I practically grew up in Phoenix.

  Dan Quayle

• I spend a great deal of time with the President. We have a very close, personal, loyal relationship. I'm not, as they say, a potted plant in these meetings.

  Dan Quayle

• I want to be Robin to Bush's Batman.

  Dan Quayle

• I was known as the chief grave robber of my state.

  Dan Quayle

• I'm going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we've had in a couple of hundred years.

  Dan Quayle

• I've never professed to be anything but an average student.

  Dan Quayle

• Illegitimacy is something we should talk about in terms of not having it.

  Dan Quayle

• In George Bush you get experience, and with me you get - The Future!

  Dan Quayle

• It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.

  Dan Quayle

• It's time for the human race to enter the solar system.

  Dan Quayle

• 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 - to the back!

  Dan Quayle

• My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.

  Dan Quayle

• Republicans understand the importance of bondage between a mother and child.

  Dan Quayle

• Sometimes cameras and television are good to people and sometimes they aren't. I don't know if its the way you say it, or how you look.

  Dan Quayle

• The American people would not want to know of any misquotes that Dan Quayle may or may not make.

  Dan Quayle

• The future will be better tomorrow.

  Dan Quayle

• The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean in this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century.

  Dan Quayle

• The other day the President said, I know you've had some rough times, and I want to do something that will show the nation what faith that I have in you, in your maturity and sense of responsibility. He paused, then said, would you like a puppy?

  Dan Quayle

• The President is going to benefit from me reporting directly to him when I arrive.

  Dan Quayle

• This election is about who's going to be the next President of the United States!

  Dan Quayle

• This President is going to lead us out of this recovery.

  Dan Quayle

• We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur.

  Dan Quayle

• Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds.

  Thurgood Marshall

• The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.

  Maureen Murphy

• Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you.

  Ralph Nader

• It is a measure of the framers' fear that a passing majority might find it expedient to compromise 4th Amendment values that these values were embodied in the Constitution itself.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

• It is difficult to discern a serious threat to religious liberty from a room of silent, thoughtful schoolchildren.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

• My hope is that 10 years from now, after I've been across the street at work for a while, they'll all be glad they gave me that wonderful vote.

  Sandra Day O'Connor

• The activist is not the man who says the river is dirty. The activist is the man who cleans up the river.

  Ross Perot

• A war for a great principle ennobles a nation.

  Albert Pike

• One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

  Plato

• If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

  Hyman Rickover

• I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

  Will Rogers

• I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat!

  Will Rogers

• Politics has become so expensive that it takes a lot of money even to be defeated.

  Will Rogers

• There ought to be one day - just one - when there is open season on senators.

  Will Rogers

• A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt

• I can't let important policy decisions hinge on the fact that an election is coming up every 90 days.

  Gerhard Schroeder

• We have to do more than just elect a new President if we truly want to change this country.

  Dan Quayle

• We will invest in our people, quality education, job opportunity, family, neighborhood, and yes, a thing we call America.

  Dan Quayle

• Welcome to President Bush, Mrs. Bush, and my fellow astronauts.

  Dan Quayle

• What you guys want, I'm for.

  Dan Quayle

• When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

  Dan Quayle

• When I talked to him on the phone yesterday. I called him George rather than Mr. Vice President. But, in public, it's Mr. Vice President, because that is who he is.

  Dan Quayle

• When you make as many speeches and you talk as much as I do and you get away from the text, it's always a possibility to get a few words tangled here and there.

  Dan Quayle

• Inflation is as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber and as deadly as a hit man.

  Ronald Reagan

• A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they're dead.

  Leo Rosten

• If nominated, I will not run; if elected, I will not serve.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

• A diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.

  Caskie Stinnett

• I've been to war, and it's not easy to kill. It's bloody and messy and totally horrifying, and the consequences are serious.

  Oliver Stone

• I am extraordinarily patient, provided I get my own way in the end.

  Margaret Thatcher

• There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

  Alexis de Tocqueville

• A leader in the Democratic Party is a boss, in the Republican Party he is a leader.

  Harry S. Truman

• All the president is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing, and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

  Harry S. Truman

• Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

  Mark Twain

• Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.

  Mark Twain

• Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.

  Gore Vidal

• Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

  Gore Vidal

• Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.

  Gore Vidal

• Justice, sir, is the great interest of man on earth. It is the ligament which holds civilized beings and civilized nations together.

  Daniel Webster

• Bad politicians are sent to Washington by good people who don't vote.

  William E. Simon

• It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

  Joseph Stalin

• There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. That's the answer.

  Gertrude Stein

• The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

• We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.

  Stewart Udall

• The Vice-Presidency is sort of like the last cookie on the plate. Everybody insists he won't take it, but somebody always does.

  Bill Vaughan

• After much prayerful consideration, I feel that I must say I have climbed my last political mountain.

  George C. Wallace

• Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

  E. B. White

• The flood of money that gushes into politics today is a pollution of democracy.

  Theodore White

• Conservatives define themselves in terms of what they oppose.

  George Will

• Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.

  George Will

• A conservative is a man who just sits and thinks, mostly sits.

  Woodrow Wilson

• A free America... means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call democracy is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

• The United States brags about its political system, but the President says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm and something else when he leaves.

  Deng Xiaoping

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