Top 100 Political Life Quotes
#1. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.
Oscar Wilde
#2. I have had a lot of adversaries in my political life, but no enemies that I can remember.
Gerald R. Ford
#3. One of the characteristics of modern political life is its professionalization, such that it attracts mainly the kind of people with so great an avidity for power and self-importance that they do not mind very much the humiliations of the public exposure to which they are inevitably subjected.
Theodore Dalrymple
#4. The time is fast coming when politicians will cease to fear the religion of humanity and humanitarians will find entrance into political life indispensable for full service.
Mahatma Gandhi
#5. The reduction of political discourse to sound bites is one of the worst things that's happened in American political life.
John Silber
#6. political life came to be dominated by a pattern of interest-group politics that the era's political scientists came to call "pluralist," a form of democracy marked more by competition among organizations and lobbyists than by a sense of the public interest.
Ira Katznelson
#7. The fault of this country is the want of measure in political life. Flat acquiescence in illegality, followed by sanguinary reaction - that, senores, is not the way to a stable and prosperous future.
Joseph Conrad
#8. Those who control the wealth of this society have an influence over political life far in excess of their number.
Michael Pare
#9. Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
Aristotle.
#10. If in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave.
Jane Addams
#11. The growing influence of women is the one reassuring thing in our political life.
Oscar Wilde
#12. We had representatives of most every ethnic group in the public school, and I always felt that this gave me a sense of balance about those ethnic problems that was useful to me in later life, and particularly in political life.
Prescott Bush
#13. People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.
Thomas Frank
#14. From the earliest beginnings of Lyndon Johnson's political life - from his days at college when he had captured control of campus politics - his tactics had consistently revealed a pragmatism and a cynicism that had no discernible limits.
Robert A. Caro
#15. For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.
Michael Rostovtzeff
#16. We demand of our political life greater certainty and greater perfection than we demand of our personal life.
Max Lerner
#17. I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I'd like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people's lives.
John F. Kerry
#18. Everybody makes personal decisions that are right for them and if you're in political life, you're used to having those analyzed.
Elizabeth Edwards
#20. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#21. When we catch sight of the soul, we can become healers in a wounded world-in the family, in the neighborhood, in the workplace, and in political life-as we are called back to our "hidden wholeness" amid the violence of the storm.
Parker J. Palmer
#22. The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.
Paul Keating
#23. Two kinds of men generally best succeed in political life; men of no principle, but of great talent; and men of no talent, but of one principle - that of obedience to their superiors.
Wendell Phillips
#24. I don't think you could find any person in political life today who has been subjected to more attacks and had more money spent against her by special interests, among whom you have named a few, than I.
Hillary Clinton
#25. A party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life.
John Stuart Mill
#26. You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy.
David Lange
#27. I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure.
Chen Shui-bian
#28. In the West, we have deliberately excluded religion from political life and regard faith as an essentially private activity. But this is a modern development, dating only to the eighteenth century, and would have been incomprehensible to both Jesus and Paul.
Karen Armstrong
#30. Personally, I don't even read bummer news stories about the environment because it makes me feel helpless to fix anything and reminds me that the general population doesn't treat these issues as an important part of our political life.
Rachel Dratch
#31. It is a fact of modern political life that when such disasters strike, even those Americans who say they believe in smaller government, or no government at all, quickly break glass and call the government, demanding relief.
David Axelrod
#32. Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.
John Howard
#33. No man demands what he desires; each man demands what he fancies he can get. Soon people forget what the man really wanted first; and after a successful and vigorous political life, he forgets it himself. The whole is an extravagant riot of second bests, a pandemonium of pis-aller.
G.K. Chesterton
#34. If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.
George Papandreou
#35. Obama dreams of a society without power relations, without the agonism that constitutes political life. Against such a position one might assert that justice is always an agon, a conflict, and to refuse this assertion is to consign human beings to wallow in some emotional, fusional balm.
Simon Critchley
#36. With our gift for language and willingness to stand up and be counted, as well as heaps of charm and charisma, we Irish have long been an integral part of American political life.
Rashers Tierney
#37. Education, work, and access to health care for all are key elements for development and the just distribution of goods, for the attainment of social justice, for membership in society, and for free and responsible participation in political life.
Pope Francis
#38. There is a time for everything, also for my time in politics which has been long and eventful. Now I believe it is time for others to take the baton that was passed to me following the crash. I have therefore decided to leave political life at the end of this term.
Johanna Siguroardottir
#39. And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)
George Bernard Shaw
#40. I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.
Michael Ignatieff
#41. The very definition of the innate hollowness of leading a political life when you end up on your nearest and dearest moments or most personal evenings with donors. That should - that should tell you all you need to know about the ramble that is politics.
Dennis Miller
#42. The plain truth is that labor is the chief representative force that keeps the real special interests from dominating American political life.
Lane Kirkland
#43. Whatever our religion and our private convictions, we are the collective inheritors of things both excellent and rare, and political life, for us, ought to have one overriding goal, which is to hold fast to those things, in order to pass them on to our children.
Roger Scruton
#44. It takes heart to be in political life.
Pat Nixon
#45. Oh how I wish he (Franklin Pierce) was out of political life! How much better it would be for him on every account!
Jane Pierce
#46. Wouldn't it be grand if we thought that theater could have that impact on the political life of a country?
Patrick Stewart
#47. The almost erotic pleasure of spending money that others have earned and saved is one reason people put up with the tiresome aspects of political life.
George Will
#48. I have invested the best part of my adult political life in helping to try to build up this movement and I am far from perfect but I do think I am able, through the media, to deliver a good, simple, understandable message.
Nigel Farage
#49. I do not understand those who divide political life from the point of view of political parties.
Milos Zeman
#50. The real political life in Russia unfortunately is not in the parliament but on the streets and in the media.
Garry Kasparov
#51. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.
S.I. Hayakawa
#52. The worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law in the early part of his first Administration.
Mitch McConnell
#53. It is possible that the distinction between moral relativism and moral absolutism has sometimes been blurred because an excessively consistent practice of either leads to the same practical result - ruthlessness in political life.
Richard Hofstadter
#54. That part of the Englishman's nature which has found gratification in religion is now drifting into political life.
Beatrice Webb
#55. I let the American people down, and I have to carry that burden for the rest of my life. My political life is over. I will never again have an opportunity to serve in any official position. Maybe I can give a little advice from time to time.
Richard M. Nixon
#56. The Cold War was really the great struggle of the 20th Century and it shaped American political life from top to bottom.
Jeff Sharlet
#57. Religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#58. When my sister and I came along, my father's political life was completely over. He ran for president the year I was born. So that was the end of it. He had been congressman first, then governor, before all that. So when we came along, he was running the Dayton newspaper.
Anne Cox Chambers
#59. We shouldn't waste any more time in making sure that democracy is properly rooted in our political life and the supremacy of the law becomes an integral part of our state's structure.
Ahmet Necdet Sezner
#60. My family life and early political life - being exposed to the news constantly, being enrolled in an Afrocentric education program, and doing the extracurriculars I did - played a huge role in me finding my path.
Baratunde Thurston
#61. Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
V.S. Naipaul
#62. I passed blindly many things which belong to real and political life.
Max Beckmann
#63. The United States supports the reintegration of people who have fought with the Taliban into Afghan society provided they: one, renounce al Qaeda, two, lay down their arms and renounce violence, and three, participate in the public political life of the country in accordance with the constitution.
Richard Holbrooke
#64. I must say acting was good training for the political life which lay ahead for us.
Nancy Reagan
#65. How much of our literature, our political life, our friendships and love affairs, depend on being able to talk peacefully in a bar!
John Wain
#66. In political life, it is extremely difficult to remain loyal to a friendship when constellations of power or interests are in the way.
Martin Schulz
#67. I believe that if something like a political life is to remain for us in this world of technology, then it begins with friendship. Therefore my task is to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, careful, tasteful friendships.
Ivan Illich
#68. The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life.
J. William Fulbright
#69. Never lose your temper with the Press or the public is a major rule of political life.
Christabel Pankhurst
#70. We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own.
John Le Carre
#71. There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.
Pankaj Mishra
#72. It is an axiom of political life that you never raise expectations, whether in a political or military campaign, because your defeats are then magnified and your victories discounted.
Charles Krauthammer
#74. I've been really at the highest levels of American political life.
Hillary Clinton
#75. Like most artists and musicians, I considered myself detached from the political life ... but I had an insight that maybe we would have a political contribution to make in the future.
Gilberto Gil
#76. In former days, when there were Whigs instead of Liberals, it was almost a rule of political life that all leading Whigs sould be uncles, brothers-in-law, or cousins to each other. This was pleasant and gave great consistency to the party; but the system has now gone out of vogue.
Anthony Trollope
#77. There is a clear intent to keep Christian thinking out of the mainstream of the media and the nation's political life.
Erwin W. Lutzer
#79. The presence of the other, which can be very threatening, becomes, in play, a delightful source of curiosity, and this curiosity contributes toward the development of healthy attitudes in friendship, love, and, later, political life. Winnicott
Martha C. Nussbaum
#80. As long as men completely dominate business and political life, as long as women are economically dependent on men, as long as the burden of child care falls wholly on women's shoulders (toppling even the most egalitarian couples), you cannot speak of a liberated female sexuality.
Esther Perel
#81. For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.
Michael Ignatieff
#82. The Soviet assumption that all other political life-forms and beliefs were inherently and immutably hostile was the simple and central cause of that Cold War.
Robert Conquest
#83. No man is fit to be a Senator ... unless he is willing to surrender his political life for great principle.
Henry F. Ashurst
#84. One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.
Barton Swaim
#85. And I've been incredibly lucky to have a long career in journalism that has given me a front-row seat to some of the most important moments in modern American political life.
Judy Woodruff
#86. But no city-state ever solved the problem of incorporating new territories and new populations into its existing structure, or involving really large numbers of people in its political life (p. 11)
Joseph Reese Strayer
#87. The Labor Party is a body that does not seek political life, and does not fight for its life.
Ami Ayalon
#88. Cannot the nation that has absorbed ten million foreigners into its political life without catastrophe absorb ten million Negro Americans into that same political life at less cost than their unjust and illegal exclusion will involve?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#89. I had already learned from more than a decade of political life that I was going to be criticized no matter what I did, so I might as well be criticized for something I wanted to do.
Rosalynn Carter
#90. If I do something that depresses, it's not because I'm depressed, but because political life and history is depressing.
Anselm Kiefer
#91. My family helped start [this country], we've been in political life ... since the 1690s, and I have a very possessive sense about this country.
Gore Vidal
#92. People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.
Aristotle.
#93. If I were running to be somebody, there are a lot of easier sombodies to be. After all, running against the incumbent governor of your own party in your home state is not the next logical step in a political life.
Marco Rubio
#94. You cannot live a political life, you cannot live a moral life if you're not willing to open your eyes and see the world more clearly. See some of the injustice that's going on. Try to make yourself aware of what's happening in the world. And when you are aware, you have a responsibility to act.
Bill Ayers
#95. Everything in our political life tends to hide from us that there is anything wiser than our ordinary selves.
Matthew Arnold
#96. Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.
Aristotle.
#97. I was myself so smitten in public opinion that it was the almost universal view that my political life was at last ended.
Winston S. Churchill
#98. Christians who have influence in political life must feel as individuals responsibility in front of their own faith. And the duty of encouraging laws that are not in contradiction with the Commandments comes within the mission of the Church.
Karl Lehmann
#99. Of all my false identities, the strategies in my campaign to be accepted, being a sworn Republican is the hardest to explain. In my later political life, I can only be described as a Kennedy Democrat, eager to pursue equitable treatment for the least fortunate.
James McGreevey
#100. When you've spent half your political life dealing with humdrum issues like the environment, it's exciting to have a real crisis on your hands.
Margaret Thatcher
