Quotes About Public office

If you have sense enough to realize why flies gather around a restaurant, you should be able to appreciate why men run for office.

A man can of course hold public office, and many a man does hold public office, and lead a public career of a sort, even if there are other men who possess secrets about him which he cannot afford to have divulged. But no man can lead a public career really worth leading, no man can act with rugged independence in serious crises, nor strike at great abuses, nor afford to make powerful and unscrupulous foes, if he is himself vulnerable in his private character.

No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

The reasons I put the uniform on are the same reasons I'm running for office.

I have been immeasurably honored to serve the people of Maine for nearly 40 years in public office and for the past 17 years in the United States Senate. It was incredibly difficult to decide that I would not seek a fourth term in the Senate.

You wouldn't run for the United States Senate or for governor or for anything else without answering people's questions about what you believe. And I think the Supreme Court is no different.

The bottom line is, there have been a lot of nuts elected to the United States Senate.

Sarah Palin, who with 17 months remaining in her single term as Alaska's governor quit the only serious office she has ever held, is obsessively discussed as a possible candidate in 2012. Why? She is not going to be president and will not be the Republican nominee unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states.

I do believe that being in public office is all about making choices. And if I'm president, I would steer this nation in a direction where we embrace progressive values.

So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.

Meantime, new thoughts came to the nation: the inevitable period of moral retrogression and political trickery that ever follows in the wake of war overtook us. So flagrant became the political scandals that reputable men began to leave politics alone, and politics consequently became disreputable. Men began to pride themselves on having nothing to do with their own government, and to agree tacitly with those who regarded public office as a private perquisite.

[W]ell I know that no man will ever bring out of that office the reputation which carries him into it.

In the present case it is a little inaccurate to say I hate everything. I am strongly in favor of common sense, common honesty and common decency. This makes me forever ineligible to any public office of trust or profit in the Republic. But I do not repine, for I am a subject of it only by force of arms.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

I am a registered Democrat and two-time unsuccessful candidate for office.

There is absolutely no way that I would enter that world. I would never run for office.

Kellyanne Conway is one of the most dishonest humans ever to grace the office she holds.

I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.

people seemed to hold that the one sole end of the entire establishment of public office was to elect one man like Sheriff Hampton big enough or at least with sense and character enough to run the county and then fill the rest of the jobs with cousins and inlaws who had failed to make a living at everything else they ever tried.

As Members of Congress, we should not be using public office for private gain.

I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.

We shouldn't leave the work of politics to people who run for public office.

Most of the people who are in elective office in Washington, D.C., they have held public office before. How's that working for you?

I'm not involved in politics, and I've never had any political role. I've never been in office. I've never taken any public administrative jobs.