quotations about politics
Everybody knows politics is a contact sport.
BARACK OBAMA
The New Yorker, May 31, 2004
There's just one rule for politicians all over the world: Don't say in Power what you say in Opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.
JOHN GALSWORTHY
Maid in Waiting
I mean, what happens is, wherever you go anywhere in the world, and leaders start talking to each other you get into a competition as to who's politics is crazy. I always say to people I think we're ahead, but you know it's a lot of people are competing to catch up with us.
TONY BLAIR
interview, CNBC, November 5, 2019
Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.
DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER
letter to Leonard V. Finder, January 22, 1948
I do not believe that any work of art can help but be diminished by its adherence at any cost to a political program ... and not for any other reason than that there is no political program -- any more than there is a theory of tragedy -- which can encompass the complexities of real life.
ARTHUR MILLER
introduction, Collected Plays
That mysterious independent variable of political calculation, Public Opinion.
THOMAS HUXLEY
"Universities, Actual & Ideal"
Politics: a Trojan horse race.
STANISLAW JERZY LEC
Unkempt Thoughts
There was an apathy beneath the empty passion-play of politics. The center had frayed like a rag rug that had been washed and walked on and shaken and hung and dried.
STEPHEN KING
The Gunslinger
In 2018, the White House is occupied by a man with no evident principles beyond promoting his own brand and chalking up "wins," however he might define them. He's so uninterested in the particulars of governing that he recently told lawmakers that he would sign whatever immigration bill they sent him. How do you negotiate with a chief executive who doesn't know what a good deal is?
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
"The Jell-O President and the Shutdown", New York Times, January 22, 2018
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
HENRY ADAMS
The Education of Henry Adams
The acid test of politics is not what you say at the hustings, but what you actually do in government.
MARGARET THATCHER
speech to Scottish Conservative Party Conference, May 12, 1979
All that I grasped was that to repeat what everybody else was thinking was, in politics, the mark not of an inferior but of a superior mind.
MARCEL PROUST
Within a Budding Grove
Not to have a correct political point of view is like having no soul.
MAO ZEDONG
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong
I say that politics is the most important of the civil activities and has its own field of action, which is not that of religion. Political institutions are secular by definition and operate in independent spheres. All my predecessors have said the same thing, for many years at least, albeit with different accents. I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here.
POPE FRANCIS
"How the Church will change", La Repubblica, October 1, 2013
When philosophers try to be politicians they generally cease to be philosophers.
WALTER LIPPMANN
A Preface to Politics
Politics is a far more intellectual business than is often realized. You may think: Well, if it's simplicity that's required, you don't need a whole lot of detail. Wrong. The simplicity is not born of superficial analysis. It is simple precisely because it is the product of being worked through.
TONY BLAIR
A Journey: My Political Life
Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish
When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Illustrated London News, April 6, 1918
All political movements are like this -- we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.
DORIS LESSING
"A Notorious Life", Salon, November 11, 1997
A politician don't steal elections, he pays for 'em.
KEN ALSTAD
Savvy Sayin's