Cynical Politics Quotes & Sayings

Is there any body of citizens in the country who actually welcome and enjoy a General Election?..YES. Those citizens are schoolchildren ... attending national schools. It may be very cynical, but on the appointed day those Lyceums of lower learning are turned into polling stations, the homes of innocence temporarily become part of the grim apparatus of politics and the scheming of sundry chancers. — Flann O'Brien

Retro looking stuff but a lot of these guys doing these shows are my age or younger. I was just disgusted. I hated being around that kind of thing. Not that it affected what I did because when it comes down to it I was doing my own show. — Jhonen Vasquez

A lot of people have asked me whether I am a cynic or take a cynical view of politics and are often surprised when I say that I consider myself an optimist, but an optimist dressed in the robes of a realist. — Beau Willimon

From the moment we'd met, he'd dragged me into the deep, swearing to me he was in there with me. It was a lie. He'd waded back out to the shallows and left me to drown. — Samantha Young

You know, the cynicism that is in the politics, it is not for my soul. It makes me - out of me, an extremely bitter, cynical person that I hate to see in the mirror, really. — Marjane Satrapi

I reject the cynical view that politics is a dirty business. — Richard M. Nixon

When we have money, we start making mistakes. — Jack Ma

Politicians who wish to succeed must be prepared to dissemble, at times to lie. All deceit is bad. In politics some deceit or moral dishonesty is the oil without which the machinery would not work. — Woodrow Wyatt

There's nothing more oily and cynical in politics than telling the truth. — P. J. O'Rourke

There's nothing colder than chemistry. — Anita Loos

EMILY's List has worked a lot with swing women voters over the years, and one thing we've learned is that they are very cynical about politics and politicians. They very much want help with the challenges facing them and their families, and they feel like most politicians don't understand or want to lift a finger to help them out. — Ellen Malcolm

Promising something that seems popular at the time that you know you're never going to deliver - that's the kind of cynical politics that I don't want any part of. — Justin Trudeau

Virtually every politician portrayed in film or on television over the last decade has been venal, corrupt, opportunistic, cynical, if not worse. Whether these dramatized images are accurate or exagerated matters little. The corporatist system wins either way: directly through corruption and indirectly through the damage done to the citizen's respect for the representative system.
(III - From Corporatism to Democracy) — John Ralston Saul

I felt slightly superior to student politics, for instance. I had no reason to think this, but I thought of myself as slightly more seasoned. I became quite cynical talking to my student friends. — Kazuo Ishiguro

These were the Sophists, and their interest was in teaching the use of argumentative skills of the sort previous philosophers had exhibited, but as a means of attaining worldly success, for instance in politics. Unfortunately, they gained a reputation for being rather cynical and unscrupulous in their argumentative standards: any old argument would do as long as it persuaded one's listener, even if it was totally fallacious; what mattered was winning the debate, not arriving at the truth, and the line between logic and rhetoric was thus blurred. (The Sophists are still with us. Today we call them "lawyers," "professors of literary criticism," and "Michael Moore.") — Edward Feser

The way I see politics is, I don't think it's cynical to accept the fact politicians are human beings, that they're flawed, and they represent the best and the worst of us. — Beau Willimon

[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war on terrorism; it is, rather, the way that the past decade has splintered them away from other Americans. This fracture comes with a steep price: in today's toxic atmosphere, liberals are no less cynical, shortsighted, and parochial than anyone else, and they understand their fellow-Americans just as badly as they themselves are understood. When liberals look at red-state voters, they see either a mob of pious know-nothings or the insensible victims of militarism and class warfare. Yet ... [such people] defy fixed categories, which means that they have to be figured out the hard way
on their own terms. — George Packer

Some book reviewer whose name I forget recently called me a 'vicious misanthrope' ... or maybe it was a 'cynical misanthrope' ... but either way, he (or she) was right; and what got me this way was politics. — Hunter S. Thompson

If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns. — Ezra Klein

The only force more ruthless and cynical than the business of big politics is the politics of big business. — Gregory David Roberts

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote. — David Foster Wallace

666 Pennsylvania Ave. "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six." - Revelation 13:18 — Hunter S. Thompson

If you give people more perspective of one object, they start to see it more clearly. — Sean Lennon

A lifetime spent in the study of the history of societies since the dawn of mankind presumably inclined him to skepticism and misgivings in regard to any great scheme, religious or political, that set out to create universal happiness in one fell swoop; what it was more likely to create, in his opinion, was universal misery; and his faith in heaven-sent saviors was hardly greater. — Francois Maspero

It is time to let America be America again. To return freedom to the people. To stand on our founding principles and reject the cynical politics of the Nanny State. — Rick Perry

When a Cabinet Minister who is sacked for telling lies is re-appointed, in the face of every constitutional convention, only for the same man to be sacked again from the same Cabinet for the same offence by the same Prime Minister no wonder the public are cynical about politics. — William Hague

Concerning politics: "The American media is like a watchdog who has developed an affection for the burglar." — Ron Dart

Americans, though apparently impressed by ghastly sentimentality and outrageous hypocrisy, are by nature much more politically cynical than Canadians. In their longer history they have had much more to be cynical about. They demand a vulgar show, enjoy it, guffaw, and forget it the next morning. When a new U.S. President takes office all bets are off and his campaign platform is dismantled and stored away. — Gordon Donaldson

I have no interest in behaving or thinking cynically. But it's an easy trap to be cynical about anything, certainly when you're talking about politics or the media. — Stephen Colbert

I'm cynical about society, politics, newspapers, government. But I'm not cynical about life, love, goodness, death. That's why I really don't want to be labeled a cynic. — John Lennon

Politics has come to resemble a cynical team game played by politicians, while the public has been pushed aside as if sitting on the seats of a stadium in which passion for politics is gradually making room for blindness and desperation. — Edi Rama

...to experience a furious disillusionment with 'conventional' politics, a bit young to be so cynical and so superior, you may think. My reply is that you should fucking well have been there, and felt it for yourself. — Christopher Hitchens

What I'm asking for is hard. It's easier to be cynical; to accept that change isn't possible, and politics is hopeless, and to believe that our voices and actions don't matter. But if we give up now, then we forsake a better future. — Barack Obama

The very effect of the education they were given ... was to make men think; and, thinking, they became less and less satisfied with the miserable pays they received. — John Grierson

The naively cynical measure a piece of legislation, a victory, a milestone not against the past or the limits of the possible, but against their ideas of perfection... — Rebecca Solnit