quotations about politics
When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.
THOMAS JEFFERSON
attributed, The Quotable Founding Fathers
I happily concede that politics harbours the crooked, the mean-minded, the sanctimonious, the incompetent, and the just plain evil. This is only right and proper. Democracy is built on public representation of the totality of the population. The totality of any population has crooks, knaves, and fruit bats. Where would we be without them? We'd have a whole load of under-employed Pharisees, with nothing to look down on or to sanctimoniously sneer at.
TERRY PRONE
"So-called New Politics is the same old politics under a new name", Irish Examiner, May 2, 2016
The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.
EMMA GOLDMAN
"Anarchism: What It Really Stands For", Anarchism and Other Essays
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
No one you'd really like to see in public office has the bad taste to run.
F. PAUL WILSON
Implant
Politics is that rare sport where the amateur contest is actually more interesting than the professional.
LAWRENCE LESSIG
Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--and a Plan to Stop It
We should make politicians dress like race car drivers -- when they get money, make them wear the company logos on their suit.
JAY LENO
The Tonight Show, October 2, 2009
Finality is not the language of politics.
BENJAMIN DISRAELI
speech, February 28, 1859
Too many of us get too pious when candidates change their positions. We charge them with flip-flopping and accuse them of being merely like a weathervane. Candidates sometimes change their minds because circumstances have changed. Sometimes, too, they change because they have learned new facts or understand new realities. Sure, they sometimes change because of calculating political expediency. But it is only the stubborn, rigid, overly self-confident and politically deaf leader who is unwilling to compromise and change course where this is sensible.
THOMAS E. CRONIN
"Giving up on politics is not an option", The Denver Post, April 30, 2016
One may perhaps be led to suppose that it is virtue that is the end of the statesman's life. Yet even virtue itself would seem to fall short of being an absolute end.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
What a wonderful magic politics is ... it can recognize the truth and still override it, providing you can get a consensus among the people who matter.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Once upon a time there was a politician who made an especially conspicuous ass of himself and didn't say the newspapers misquoted him.
ROBERT ELLIOTT GONZALES
Poems and Paragraphs
Not everybody is comfortable with the idea that politics is a guilty addiction. But it is. They are addicts, and they are guilty and they do lie and cheat and steal -- like all junkies.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Better than Sex
If you do politics the right way, I believe, you can actually make people's lives better. And integrity is the minimum ante to get into the game.
JOE BIDEN
Promises to Keep
Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare they have become the tools of corrupt interests, which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
speech, August 1912
Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The only way to reform a politician is to hang him.
ABRAHAM MILLER
Unmoral Maxims
A persistent theme in western thought has been the dream of a world without politics and without conflict. Is it possible to realize such a society, or is the political an irreplaceable aspect of what it is to be human? Many of the utopias which have infested the western imagination are indeed unpolitical places; all the tasks which were previously performed by politics are programmed by an invisible hand or by a supreme intelligence and require no further attention. But many of these utopias were envisioned as an outcome of politics, after which politics could be dispensed with.
ANDREW GAMBLE
Politics and Fate
In politics the middle way is none at all.
JOHN ADAMS
letter to Horatio Gates, March 23, 1776
He earned a national reputation managing large political campaigns, turning them into media-driven extravaganzas with emphasis on sound bites and perception over any kind of substance, and his win rate was astonishingly high. That probably said more for the gullibility of the modern voter than the high standards of the modern candidate.
DAVID BALDACCI
Split Second