The total collapse of the public opinion polls shows that this country is in good health. A country that developed an airtight system of finding out in advance what was in people’s minds would be uninhabitable.
Elwyn Brooks White
Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.
George Jean Nathan
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
The so-called science of poll-taking is not a science at all but mere necromancy. People are unpredictable by nature, and although you can take a nation’s pulse, you can’t be sure that the nation hasn’t just run up a flight of stairs.
Elwyn Brooks White
Don’t blame me. I voted with the majority.
Author Unknown
Elections are never right or good, they serve only to give morons some power!
Carl William Brown
Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on offices, a rottenness begins in his conduct.
Thomas Jefferson
We have plenty of confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our confidence in.
Will Rogers
Mankind will never see an end of trouble until… lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power… become lovers of wisdom.
Plato, The Republic
Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?
Will Rogers
Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.
Franklin P. Adams
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
George Eliot
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
Karl Marx
You don’t have to fool all the people all of the time; you just have to fool enough to get elected.
Gerald Barzan
Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.
José Maria de Eça de Queiroz
To win in this country these days you have got to campaign down to a thirteen year-old’s level of mental development.
Willie Brown
Defeat has its lessons as well as victory.
Patrick Buchanan
Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.
Richard Armour
When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.
Edmund Burke
Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.
Elmer Davis
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.
Charles Krauthammer
In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.
Charles de Gaulle
Do not run a campaign that would embarrass your mother.
Robert C. Byrd
Someone suggested me this definition: politicians, overpaid shit! He might be right!
Carl William Brown
Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.
Alan Coren
The most important political office is that of the private citizen.
Louis Brandeis
If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.
Will Rogers
George Washington is the only president who didn’t blame the previous administration for his troubles.
Author Unknown
Don’t vote, it only encourages them.
Billy Connolly
We have a presidential election coming up. And I think the big problem, of course, is that someone will win.
Barry Crimmins
The problem with political jokes is they get elected.
Henry Cate
Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.
H.L. Mencken
You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.
Mario Cuomo
America: where a little thing like a majority won’t get in the way of democracy!
Author Unknown
Get the fools on your side and you can be elected to anything.
Frank Dane
How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?
Author Unknown
Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft. Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.
Will Rogers
I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.
W. C. Fields
When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow
Our presidential race is beginning to sound more and more like Harry Potter’s duel with the Ministry of Magic.
Dave Beard
I always voted at my party’s call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all.
W. S. Gilbert
Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.
Sydney J. Harris
Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?
Robert Orben
Truth is not determined by majority vote.
Doug Gwyn
I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work. We are supposed to work it.
Alexander Woollcott
A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.
Bill Vaughan
In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.
Newt Gingrich
Take our politicians: they’re a bunch of yo-yos. The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.
Saul Bellow
Everybody except us is running for governor.
Barry Gray
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is… the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
Adlai Stevenson
Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.
Robert Byrne
The election is not very far off when a candidate can recognize you across the street.
Kin Hubbard
Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.
James Harvey Robinson
We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.
Frank McKinney
Anytime you see white men suppose to fight each other an you not white, well you know you got trouble, because they blah-blah loud about Democrat or Republican an they huffing an puff about democracy someplace else but relentless, see, the deal come down evil on somebody don have no shirt an tie, somebody don live in no whiteman house no whiteman country.
June Jordan
Democracy: The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.
Benjamin Lichtenberg
I have just received the following wire from my generous Daddy. It says, “Dear Jack: Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.”
John F. Kennedy
If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?
Author Unknown
A politician should have three hats. One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.
Carl Sandburg
If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.
Emma Goldman
During a campaign the air is full of speeches – and vice versa.
Author Unknown
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
A new poll showed that if the election was held today, people would be confused because it is normally held in November.
Kevin Nealon
There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.
Author Unknown
If God had wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.
Jay Leno
People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote – a very different thing.
Walter H. Judd
Elections are held to delude the populace into believing that they are participating in government.
Gerald F. Lieberman
Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.
Author Unknown
If elected I shall be thankful; if not, it will be all the same.
Abraham Lincoln
Football strategy does not originate in a scrimmage: it is useless to expect solutions in a political campaign.
Walter Lippmann
We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.
Stewart Udall
In politics women type the letters, lick the stamps, distribute the pamphlets and get out the vote. Men get elected.
Clare Boothe Luce
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan
Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.
Gore Vidal
I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.
Adlai Stevenson
The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
Vote early and vote often.
William Porcher Miles
Finishing second in the Olympics gets you silver. Finishing second in politics gets you oblivion.
Richard M. Nixon
Maybe a nation that consumes as much booze and dope as we do and has our kind of divorce statistics should pipe down about “character issues.” Either that or just go ahead and determine the presidency with three-legged races and pie-eating contests. It would make better TV.
P. J. O’Rourke
When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.
John Gardner
American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age.
Marshall McLuhan
There is a sort of exotic preposterousness about a lot of elections, the way arguments are made even cruder.
Chris Patten
Our political institutions work remarkably well. They are designed to clang against each other. The noise is democracy at work.
Michael Novak
My opponent called me a cream puff. Well, I rushed out and got the baker’s union to endorse me.
Claiborne Pell
Which one of the three candidates would you want your daughter to marry?
H. Ross Perot
The only thing we learn from new elections is we learned nothing from the old.
American Proverb
The Republicans have their splits right after election and Democrats have theirs just before an election.
Will Rogers
There isn’t any finer folks living than a Republican that votes the Democratic ticket.
Will Rogers
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.
Alexis de Tocqueville
If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.
Meg Greenfield
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.
James Freeman Clarke
An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names, but are as alike in their principals and aims as two peas in the same pod.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.
Jean Jacques Rousseau
Reagan won because he ran against Jimmy Carter. If he ran unopposed he would have lost.
Mort Sahl
Votes should be weighed not counted.
Johann Friedrich Von Schiller
The advance planning and sense stimuli employed to capture a $10 million cigarette or soap market are nothing compared to the brainwashing and propaganda blitzes used to ensure control of the largest cash market in the world: the Executive Branch of the United States Government.
Phyllis Schlafly
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
George Bernard Shaw
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
George Bernard Shaw
Everyone was tired with the old style politicians and their flowery rhetoric. I just told them there are tough times ahead, but that they would be less tough with me in charge.
Anibal Cavaco Silva
Indeed, you won the elections, but I won the count.
Anastasio Somoza
The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man.
St. Gregory The Great
I’m not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
Adlai E. Stevenson
The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.
Adlai E. Stevenson
If you want to get elected, shake hands with 25, 000 people between and November 7.
Harry S. Truman
Let’s try winning and see what it feels like. If we don’t like it, we can go back to our traditions.
Paul Tsongas
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
Theodore White
Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.
John Quincy Adams
Where annual elections end where slavery begins.
John Quincy Adams
Suffrage is the pivotal right.
Susan B. Anthony
Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch
Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing.
Bernard M. Baruch
The fact that a man is to vote forces him to think. You may preach to a congregation by the year and not affect its thought because it is not called upon for definite action. But throw your subject into a campaign and it becomes a challenge.
John Jay Chapman
Your every voter, as surely as your chief magistrate, exercises a public trust.
Grover Cleveland
The future of this republic is in the hands of the American voter.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
O. Henry
The American people have now spoken, but it’s going to take a little while to determine what they’ve said.
Bill Clinton
We’d all like to vote for the best man, but he’s never a candidate.
Kin Hubbard
The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.
John F. Kennedy
The margin is narrow, but the responsibility is clear.
John F. Kennedy
There can no longer be anyone too poor to vote.
Lyndon B. Johnson
There is no city in the United States in which I can get a warmer welcome and fewer votes than Columbia, Ohio.
John F. Kennedy
You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.
John F. Kennedy
I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower. “Oh yeah, well I’m so insane, I voted for Eisenhower TWICE!”
Ken Kesey
Among free men there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln
The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln
The effort to calculate exactly what the voters want at each particular moment leaves out of account the fact that when they are troubled the thing the voters most want is to be told what to want.
Walter Lippmann
We just did a survey that showed… something like 65 percent of the [American] people couldn’t vote for the First Amendment if it was up for a vote today.
Peter Prichard
Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote.
William L. Shirer
Our elections are free, it’s in the results where eventually we pay.
Bill Stern
It’s not the voting that’s democracy, it’s the counting.
Tom Stoppard
All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong.
Henry David Thoreau
When a fellow tells me he’s bipartisan, I know he’s going to vote against me.
Harry S. Truman
In times of stress and strain, people will vote.
Author Unknown
No matter whom you vote for, the Government always gets in.
Author Unknown
When he first ran for office, he appealed to the voters: “I never stole anything in my life. All I ask is a chance.”
Author Unknown
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal
It makes no difference whom you vote for – the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people.
Gore Vidal
Voters don’t decide issues, they decide who will decide issues.
George F. Will
