The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.

—Daniel Moynihan

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

—Lester B. Pearson

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.

—Robert Louis Stevenson

The mistake a lot of politicians make is in forgetting they’ve been appointed and thinking they’ve been anointed.

—Claude D. Pepper

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

—Ronald Reagan

A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.

—Texas Guinan

A promising young man should go into politics so that he can go on promising for the rest of his life.

—Robert Byrne

Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks.

—Doug Larson

The bedfellows politics made are never strange. It only seems that way to those who have not watched the courtship.

 —Marcel Achard

Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic.

—Henry Brooks Adams

Men are more easily governed through their vices than through their virtues.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

Politics: where fat, bald, disagreeable men, unable to be candidates themselves, teach a president how to act on a public stage.

—Jimmy Breslin

Too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.

—George Burns

[A politician needs] the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.

—Winston Churchill