Politics Quotes

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

It is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs.

As a man can drink water from any side of a full tank, so the skilled theologian can wrest from any scripture that which will serve his purpose.

When she was a small girl, Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old, rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, Communism, Christianity, and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.

In rivers and bad governments, the lightest things swim at the top.

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.

Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.

Nothing can so alienate a voter from the political system as backing a winning candidate.

When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them.

Politics is the art of the possible.

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

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read "President Can't Swim".

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.

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.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

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

I think that a young state, like a young virgin, should modestly stay at home, and wait the application of suitors for an alliance with her; and not run about offering her amity to all the world; and hazarding their refusal. Our virgin is a jolly one; and tho at present not very rich, will in time be a great fortune, and where she has a favorable predisposition, it seems to me well worth cultivating.