Good Politicians Quotes

I don't know if I am a very good politician. I'm not a good hater.

I don't think I would be a good politician. I kid about it when I get a standing ovation. Sometimes I'll say, "I may run for Governor," but it's strictly a joke.

Never give a good politician time to pray.

I shall be a good politician. Even if it kills me. Or if it kills anyone else, for that matter.

Good politicians need not be intellectuals, but they should have intellectual lives.

President Bush gave me a tremendous opportunity to serve as the vice president. I enjoyed very much having the opportunity to be a part of his team. He told me at the outset, he wanted me to sign on to be a part of his team - and he was true to his word, kept it. He was tough. He was decisive. He was also a pretty good politician.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really good politicians. But then we started inventing - electricity, steam engines, microprocessors, understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are important - I'm not taking anything away from that - but innovation is the real driver of progress.

I believe that all literatures can have political uses and misuses. Sometimes politics can enhance, sometimes it can get in the way of imaginative literature. . . . I'm not sure one can be a creative writer and a politician -- not a "good" politician.

I never thought Hillary Clinton was a very good politician.

I generally think that Hillary Clinton is a good egg and a good politician.

Yes, I'm married. But my wife understands that a good politician has to be appealing to the ladies. The fact that I haven't even gotten close to cheating on her is a disappointment to us both.

Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.

In the end, Ted Kennedy was a politician, plain and simple. Yet he embodied how politics and public service can be successfully intertwined. You cant be a good public servant without being a good politician. Kennedy was both.

Business is a useful tool in politics, but it's not enough. You need much more than to be a good businessman, to be a good politician.

A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For if experience teaches us anything at all it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

Nothing corrupts a politician quite as much as friendship. Good politicians don't bribe; they make us like them.

I can remember when a good politician had to be 75 percent ability and 25 percent actor, but I can well see the day when the reverse could be true.

I learned early that business is business and politics is politics. The proof is how few important businessmen have made good politicians. They may think that they are very smart about everything because they made millions of dollars by digging a hole in the ground and finding oil, but the talent and luck needed to become rich are not the same talent and luck needed to succeed on Parliament Hill.

Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.

I suppose it's part of being a good politician to be able to spot the most important men in any group without outside assistance.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

All the politics in the world are nothing else but a kind of analysis of the quantity of probability in casual events, and a good politician signifies no more but one who is dexterous at such calculations.

Even a good politician, someone who is very ambitious, chooses not to see trouble.

Politics is different, because the mission is always to get the necessary votes. A good politician goes through everything in terms of mission and vision, and resourcing, but at the end of the day politicians have to make compromises in order to achieve consensus.