Top 100 Political Leader Quotes
#1. Masochists are people that have pleasure confused with pain. In a world that has television confused with entertainment, doritoes confused with food, and Dan Quayle confused with a national political leader, masochists are clearly less mixed-up than the rest of us.
P. J. O'Rourke
#2. If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too.
Katherine Anne Porter
#3. Leaders must not be chosen based on charisma, popularity, or ease of communication, all of which are misleading and have little to do with the efficacy of a political leader.
Veronica Roth
#4. I see myself as more of a policy maker than a political leader.
Paul Ryan
#5. I think leadership is knowing what you want to achieve and then purposefully and sensibly taking steps to achieve it, remembering always that you have got to bring people with you if you are seeking to be a successful political leader.
Tony Abbott
#6. The father receives his power from God (and from his own father). The teacher finds the soil already prepared for obedience, and the political leader has only to harvest what has been sown.
Alice Miller
#7. A political leader who desires to be useful to the revolutionary proletariat must be able to distinguish concrete cases of compromises that are inexcusable and are an expression of opportunism and treachery.
Vladimir Lenin
#8. While madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.
Joyce Carol Oates
#9. Mussolini was the greatest political leader of the century.
Gianfranco Fini
#10. Because the task of a political leader is to do what he believes is better for his country. Sometimes the public opinion is in favor; sometimes the public opinion needs a little bit more time to understand things.
Jose Maria Aznar
#11. A political leader must keep looking over his shoulder all the time to see if the boys are still there. If they aren't still there, he's no longer a political leader.
Bernard Baruch
#12. We must unite. Violence against women cannot be tolerated, in any form, in any context, in any circumstance, by any political leader or by any government.
Ban Ki-moon
#13. I would not like to be a political leader in Russia. They never know when they're being taped.
Richard M. Nixon
#14. An inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however distant.
Nikola Tesla
#15. No militia or political leader is so powerful - his name never so influential - as when he is dead, enshrined on wall posters and gateposts amid naively painted clusters of tulips and roses, the final artistic accolade of every armed martyr in Lebanon.
Robert Fisk
#16. Margaret Thatcher was the first political leader in any major country to warn of the dangers of climate change
Ed Miliband
#17. The most extremist power any political leader can assert is the power to target his own citizens for execution without any charges or due process, far from any battlefield. The Obama administration has not only asserted exactly that power in theory, but has exercised it in practice.
Glenn Greenwald
#18. What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If voters care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.
Newt Gingrich
#19. In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.
Irving Layton
#20. I know that the right kind of political leader for the Labour Party is a desiccated calculating machine.
Aneurin Bevan
#21. A political leader is necessarily an imposter since he believes in solving life's problems without asking its question.
Andre Malraux
#22. Convictions no doubt have to be modified or expanded to meet changing conditions but ... to be a reliable political leader sooner or later your anchors must hold fast where other men's drag.
Margot Asquith
#23. Economics is primarily useful, both to the student and to the
political leader, as a prophylactic against popular fallacies.
Henry Calvert Simons
#24. For the political leader the religious doctrines and institutions of his people must always remain inviolable; or else has no right to be in politics, but should become a reformer, if he has what it takes!
Adolf Hitler
#25. The word "anarchy" does not mean "no rules." It does not mean "kill others for fun." It does not mean "no organization." It simply means: "without a political leader.
Stefan Molyneux
#26. You have to be a political leader, willing to lose an election if you want to do what's right.
Scott Pelley
#27. ... The political leader must constantly appraise and reappraise the means through which 'he can hope to do justice to the responsibility that power imposes upon him' while at the same time pursuing political values with conviction.
Nicholas Gane
#28. Today, the Pope is only a religious figure. At the time of 'The Borgias,' he was also a political leader, a financial leader, and the head of an army. I think popes are much less relevant today than they were then.
Francois Arnaud
#29. The 2016 presidential election is ripe for the emergence of a game-changing political leader who either dramatically reforms one of the existing parties or mounts an independent bid.
Ron Fournier
#30. We all have a responsibility to advance the process of reconciliation, and as a political leader, I am committed to leading from the front and to continue to take bold and significant steps.
Martin McGuinness
#31. Whether you are a business leader or political leader, you need people around you who are prepared to tell the truth.
Michael Kroger
#32. The Congress leadership always denied responsibilities to me both within the government and within the party organisation ... They would always tell me my image as a Hindu leader was a constraint on my capacity as a political leader.
Satpal Maharaj
#33. I think the journey for a politician goes from wanting to please all the people all the time, to a political leader that realises in the end his responsibility is to decide. And when he decides, he divides.
Tony Blair
#34. When you're a political leader, when you represent the entire state or the entire country, not just Republicans or not just Democrats or not just the poor or not just the rich, you have to really represent everybody. No matter who contributes money, when you win, you represent everyone.
David Shuster
#35. If I had to choose one which best characterized the condition of being a political leader in Athens, the word would be "tension".
Moses Finley
#36. If a thief and an immoral society finds a thief and an immoral political leader, it will support him to the death!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#37. I think almost every political leader is always told that the next speech they make is the most crucial one.
Iain Duncan Smith
#38. Political leaders normally act by making convincing speeches.
Helmut Schmidt
#39. The future will belong to the nature-smart-those individuals, families, businesses, and political leaders who develop a deeper understanding of the transformative power of the natural world and who balance the virtual with the real. The more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.
Richard Louv
#40. I feel fortunate that, by the age of 40, I had crammed in an entire political career.I had been in the Cabinet and been leader of the party, so now I can branch out into other things ... it is a very liberating feeling.
William Hague
#41. Real affection comes from the face. Those political leaders, when they meet, they are always hugging, but not very genuine. Deep, sincerity comes from face and eye.
Dalai Lama
#42. I know how to move between political camps. When everyone in the world hated (Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi, I paid him an official visit. It caused an uproar - Lula's visiting the devil!
Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva
#43. Future U.S. political leaders, those for whom the Cold War was not the formative experience that it was for me, may not consider the return on America's investment in NATO worth the cost.
Robert M. Gates
#44. Every age fraught with discord and danger seems to spawn a leader meant only for that age, a political giant whose absence, in retrospect, seems inconceivable when the history of that age is written.
Dan Simmons
#45. Our middle class majority, deeply in personal debt, elects political leaders who increase our benefits. Then we vote them out because we dislike the soaring national debt.
Oliver DeMille
#46. Political leaders or governments owe their position partly to force and partly to popular election. They cannot be regarded as representative of best elements, morally or intellectually, in their respective nations.
Albert Einstein
#47. The first day you're a leader is the beginning of the end of your political career.
Jenny Shipley
#49. For me, I have no political ego in this thing with respect to any other leader and what they might feel is appropriate or necessary in what they're going to try to do ... We need everybody on the front lines.
Marc Morial
#50. And let me say this as a politician I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.
Barack Obama
#51. Until the American majority is willing to live within its means, it can hardly force its political leaders to do so.
Oliver DeMille
#52. It is easy to criticize, particularly in a political season. But to lead is something altogether different. The leader must live in the real world of the price that might be paid for the goal that has been set.
Norm Coleman
#53. The difference between Nazism and Communism is just the size of the leader's moustache.
Adriano Bulla
#54. It's a historical phenomenon that in 250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous nation of the world and the leader of the world. It is indeed an achievement, a tribute to the talent of the American nation, the American people and an optimal political and economic system.
Vladimir Putin
#55. People are angry that things as common sense as securing the border and eliminating sanctuary cities are being framed as extreme views. They are tired of empty rhetoric without action, and they are hungry for a leader from outside the professional political class.
Carly Fiorina
#56. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together.
Matthew Yglesias
#57. The reality is today most of our political leaders want to be treated as gods and semi-gods, from the security details to the fuss around them and so on.
Kumi Naidoo
#58. It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.
Marian Wright Edelman
#59. Whenever a high-profile leader dies, people immediately attempt to summarize that person's life in a sentence. Often, critics and commentators get caught up looking at the leader's style, or which political or philosophical camp they represented.
John C. Maxwell
#60. The great political tragedy of our time is that conservative leaders in America have chosen to use their superior messaging and political skills to thwart serious action on global warming.
Joseph J. Romm
#62. Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22-out-of-30 top al-Qaida leaders who've been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement. Or whoever is left out there, ask them about that.
Barack Obama
#63. The capacity of Iraq's security forces has improved, and Iraq's leaders have made strides toward political accommodation
Barack Obama
#64. The world needs heroes. Be a hero and build your part of the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#65. Today, more than ever, we need political leaders who can see the big picture, who understand the relationship between the economy and its environmental support systems.
Lester R. Brown
#66. As our country bled ... its leader's wife came to this podium piously to call for a new human order, this when thousands of Filipinos were political prisoners.
Corazon Aquino
#67. We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.
Ralph Peters
#68. I think all of us could insist on preserving the truth and preserving the peace. We could insist that political candidates tell the truth about controversial issues. And secondly, we should be sure to encourage our political leaders, after they're elected, to preserve the peace.
Jimmy Carter
#69. I am deeply disturbed by the senseless violence instigated by some leaders in pursuit of their personal political agenda.
Mwai Kibaki
#70. If man chooses oblivion, he can go right on leaving his fate to his political leaders. If he chooses Utopia, he must initiate an enormous education program - immediately, if not sooner.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#71. I've never seen a great military, political, or corporate leader who was not a great storyteller. Telling stories is a core competency in business, although it's one that we don't pay enough attention to.
Bran Ferren
#72. Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune.
Milton Friedman
#73. Of course, political leaders are much more ambitious than gangsters. The latter are content to take your money, whereas the former, besides taking far more of your money, have the effrontery to violate your just rights whenever their convenience dictates ...
Robert Higgs
#74. What political leaders decide, intelligence services tend to seek to justify.
Henry A. Kissinger
#75. No rising hope on the political scene who offered his services to Labour when I happened to be its leader can be dismissed as an opportunist.
Michael Foot
#76. It is a big embarrassment that a leader can say on the eve of an election that he is not willing to hand over power to an opponent, that he can only hand over power to a member of his own political party .
Raila Odinga
#77. We have come to discover what we suspect is a new political mindset emerging among a younger generation of political leaders socialized on Internet communications. Their politics are less about right versus left and more about centralized and authoritarian versus distributed and collaborative.
Jeremy Rifkin
#78. If only political leaders would allow themselves to feel, as well as to think, the world might be a happier place.
Golda Meir
#79. So many idealistic political movements for a better world have ended in mass-murdering dictatorships. Giving leaders enough power to create 'social justice' is giving them enough power to destroy all justice, all freedom, and all human dignity.
Thomas Sowell
#80. I also do not believe that the United States can let itself be driven into a political role by escalating terrorism, and therefore, the leaders of the Arab world and Arafat should do their utmost to put an end to this and then the United States should do its utmost to produce a political solution.
Henry A. Kissinger
#81. The national interest is predetermined by geopolitics or the history of a country. Important political leaders never just followed their interests - they were concerned about the interests of their people.
Joseph Nye
#82. Polls can change; people's opinions can change. Voting intentions can change, and I think it would be a silly leader, a silly political party, that would assume that we have it sewn up.
Nicola Sturgeon
#84. We cannot proclaim this century the African Century and then ignore the AIDS pandemic, as some political leaders are apt to do. To claim this century the African Century is to declare war on AIDS.
Nelson Mandela
#85. A leader does not stand still and reject all paths forward.
James W. Mercer
#86. The key to controlling your own political party, so that it does not eat you alive, is to realize that while Democratic and Republican leaders differ sharply, their voters do not.
Dick Morris
#87. Democrats and Republicans were essentially the same party with different faces and that was why, no matter how many promises each leader made, significant change rarely transpired.
James Morcan
#88. No one is exempt from the touch of tragedy: neither the Christian nor the non-Christian; neither the rich nor the poor; neither the leader or the commoner. Crossing all racial, social, political, and economic barriers, suffering reaches out to unite mankind.
Billy Graham
#89. There is no gay leader anywhere near the stature of Martin Luther King, because black activism drew on the profound spiritual tradition of the church, to which gay political rhetoric is childishly hostile.
Camille Paglia
#90. A few years ago the idea that extreme poverty was harmful was on the fringes of the economic and political debate. But having made the case we are now seeing an emerging consensus among business leaders, economic leaders, political leaders and even faith leaders.
Winnie Byanyima
#91. The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense. Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century.
Victor Davis Hanson
#93. I think the question really is, whether our political leaders have stepped out of bounds. Because all this has been approved by our political leaders, Cheney and Bush in the first instance, and now, sadly, Barack Obama in the second instance.
Ray McGovern
#94. That moment was very important because it was political. That's what has to be done, so they struck a deal. She figures his is a well-thought-out motivation that she felt was worthy trade-off. The motivation here is survival, and she has to think like a leader.
Mary McDonnell
#95. Few things reveal more about political leaders and their systems than the manner of their downfall,
Antony Beevor
#96. Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#97. There is nothing more basic to our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders.
Mark Shields
#98. You don't die when your body stops functioning. You die when your name is uttered for the last time in the world.
Abhijit Naskar
#99. I like democracy. I like to be able to throw out my political leaders when they get things wrong, and we don't get to do that with Brussels.
David Cameron
#100. Obviously the extremists want to provoke sectarian warfare, and I am struck by the fact that over a three-year period, leaders of the (Iraqi) communities have been quite resistant to this. The test is whether the political process continues.
Peter Rodman
