For politicians truth and falsehood are unimportant. So I never could become a politician — not even a church politician.
--
As quoted in Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (1984) by James Bentley, p. 223Martin Niemoller
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If we meet an honest and intelligent politician, a dozen, a hundred, we say that they aren't like politicians at all, and our category of politician stays unchanged; we know what politicians are like.
Randall Jarrell
A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.
Harry S. Truman
Valuing family more than job gives perspectives to politics. It puts the politician in the proper place, which is somewhere less than being the self-perceived agent of God. If family comes first, the politician needs to find ways to make that clear- by words, symbols and actions. The politician must make the effort. By its nature, the job will not do it for him.
John Danforth
Many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators.
Vaclav Havel
Democracy prevents the politician's fulfillment of his obligations to the nation. Even the most well-meaning politician becomes, in a democracy, the slave of his supporters, because either he satisfies their personal interests or they destroy his organization. The politician lives under the tyranny and permanent threat of the electoral bosses. He is placed in a position in which he must choose between the termination of his lifetime work and the satisfaction of the demands of party members. And the politician, given such a choice, opts for the latter. He does so not out of his own pocket, but out of that of the country. He creates jobs, sets up missions, commissions, sinecures--all rostered in the nation's budget--which put increasingly heavy pressures on a tired people.
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu
Niemoller, Martin
Nietzsche, Friedrich
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