The art of politics consists in knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt.     —Konrad Adenauer

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.     —H.L. Mencken

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

                                                                                          —Marcel Achard

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.           —Douglas Adams

I have accepted a seat in the House of Representatives, and thereby have consented to my own ruin, to your ruin, and to the ruin of our children. I give you this warning that you may prepare your mind for your fate. —John Adams

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.

                                                                                         —Samuel Adams

In politics, madame, you need two things: friends, but above all an enemy.        —Brian Mulroney

No man, however strong, can serve ten years as schoolmaster, priest, or Senator, and remain fit for anything else.

                                                                              —Henry Brooks Adams

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business.

                                                                                     —Richard M. Nixon

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.           —E.B. White

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.              —Lord Acton

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

                                                                                              —Paulo Freire

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.                 —Robert Frost

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

                                                                          —Franklin Pierce Adams