POLITICS QUOTES III

quotations about politics

When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

attributed, The Quotable Founding Fathers

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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

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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

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Finality is not the language of politics.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI

speech, February 28, 1859

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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


Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

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No one you'd really like to see in public office has the bad taste to run.

F. PAUL WILSON

Implant

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, had always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

HENRY ADAMS

The Education of Henry Adams

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In politics the middle way is none at all.

JOHN ADAMS

letter to Horatio Gates, March 23, 1776

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The only way to reform a politician is to hang him.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims

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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

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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

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