"Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time." —Sam Rayburn

"I had rather be right than be President." —Henry Clay

"Of what does politics consist except the making of imperfect decisions, many of them unjust and quite a few of them deadly?" —Lewis Lapham

"Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance." —H.L. Mencken

"No man will ever carry out of the Presidency the reputation which carried him into it." —Thomas Jefferson

"Politics is the science of who gets what, when, and why." —Sidney Hillman

"If you ever injected truth into politics you have no politics." —Will Rogers

"Politics in America is the binding secular religion." —Theodore H. White

"All politics are based on the indifference of the majority." —James Reston

"The differenece between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation." —James Freeman Clarke

"Power is the great aphrodisiac." —Henry A. Kissinger

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." —Groucho Marx

"Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects." —Lester B. Pearson

"They may be just as intelligent as you say. But I'd feel a helluva lot better if just one of them had ever run for sheriff." —Sam Rayburn to Lyndon Johnson, on advisers to President Kennedy

"Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river." —Nikita Khrushchev

"In politics, guts is all."
— Barbara Castle

"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
— John Kenneth Galbraith

"Practical politics consists in ignoring facts." — Henry Adams

"If power corrupts, being out of power corrupts absolutely."
— Douglass Cater