Quotes About Honesty

Politicians don't lie, they misspeak. And they don't steal, they mispocket.

Unlike some politicians, I can admit to a mistake.

If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

If you ever injected truth into politics you would have no politics.

If experience teaches us anything at all, it teaches us this: that a good politician, under democracy, is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.

I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.

The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

I never bought a man who wasn't for sale.

If it's going to come out eventually, better have it come out immediately.

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

Those who have the immense dishonesty to fight with a ballot box in one hand and a rifle in the other have no place in democratic politics.

We all know that Prime Ministers are wedded to the truth, but like other wedded couples they sometimes live apart.

The political arena leaves one no alternative, one must either be a dunce or a rogue.

Surely nobody would be a charlatan, who could afford to be sincere.

You cannot adopt politics as a profession and remain honest.

If I am a great man, then all great men are frauds.

It is unfair to expect a politician to live in private up to the statements he makes in public.

I would dodge, not lie, in the national interest.

A lot of times in politics you have people look you in the eye and tell you what's not on their mind.

One of the things about federal politics is that it has been remarkably free of corruption.

I'm pretty transparent and very honest almost to a fault. I don't hide anything or sugarcoat anything. I don't play politics because that means I'd have to lie. I'm just forthright in my whole being.

There's nothing more oily and cynical in politics than telling the truth.

In the end, the tragedy of Harold Wilson was that you couldn't believe a word he said