It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.
~ Francis Bacon

A constitutional statesman is in general a man of common opinions and uncommon abilities.
~ Walter Bagehot

The apparent rulers of the English nation are like the imposing personages of a splendid procession: it is by them the mob are influenced; it is they whom the spectators cheer. The real rulers are secreted in second-rate carriages; no one cares for them or asks after them, but they are obeyed implicitly and unconsciously by reason of the splendor of those who eclipsed and preceded them.
~ Walter Bagehot

When great questions end, little parties begin.
~ Walter Bagehot

Politics, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.
~ Henry Brooks Adams

Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
~ Henry Brooks Adams

In politics the middle way is none at all.
~ John Adams

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.
~ Oscar Ameringer

Growing older, I have lost the need to be political, which means, in this country, the need to be left. I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative Party because it is the party of non-politics, of resistance to politics.
~ Kingsley Amis

The only way you can do that [Balance The Budget, Decrease Taxes, and Increase Military Spending] is with mirrors, and that's what it would take.
~ John B. Anderson

Nothing is irreparable in politics.
~ Jean Anouilh

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
~ John Arbuthnot

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.
~ Aristotle

What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.
~ Aristotle

Politics will sooner or later make fools of everybody.
~ Dick Armey

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.
~ Paddy Ashdown

He could not see a belt without hitting below it.
~ Margot Asquith

My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored; people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
~ W. H. Auden

The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation. Empirical politics must be kept in bounds by democratic institutions, which leave it up to the subjects of the experiment to say whether it shall be tried, and to stop it if they dislike it, because, in politics, there is a distinction, unknown to science, between Truth and Justice.
~ W. H. Auden

Every political system is an accumulation of habits, customs, prejudices, and principles that have survived a long process of trial and error and of ceaseless response to changing circumstances. If the system works well on the whole, it is a lucky accident -- the luckiest, indeed, that can befall a society.
~ Edward C. Banfield