Tom Cotton Quotes

If you run for mayor, people say you're being egotistical. If you decide you won't run for mayor, people say you're being self-centered and egotistical.

Anybody who wants the presidency so much that he'll spend two years organizing and campaigning for it is not to be trusted with the office.

No man should have a political office because he wants a job.

We really can't tell the difference between people who might seek power for some greater good and people who seek power just to aggrandize themselves. For example, all revolutionaries say that they want to uplift the downtrodden.

Men are moved by two levers only: fear and self interest.

It is a maxim in philosophy that ambitious men can be never good counselors to princes; the desire of having more is common to great lords, and a desire of rule a great cause of their ruin.

I think most people act in their self-interest.

Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.

Ambition is the mother of hypocrisy and prefers to skulk in corners and dark places. It cannot endure the light of day. It is an unclean vice wallowing in the depths, always hidden, but with ever an eye to advancement.

No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.

This man [Aaron Burr] has no principles, public or private. As a politician, his sole spring of action is an inordinate ambition.

Men will always be powerfully influenced in their Opinions and Actions by what appears to be their particular Interest.

The common class of mankind are actuated by no nobler principle than that of self-interest; this and this alone determines all adventurers in privateers: the owners, as well as those whom they employ.

We always knew that whatever party Nigel Farage led - first UKIP and then the Brexit party - was basically a vehicle for his own political self-glorification and now he's proved it.

Politicians have no politics.

He [Martin Van Buren] is an artful, cunning, intriguing, selfish, speculating lawyer, who, by holding lucrative offices for more than half his life, has contrived to amass a princely fortune, and is now seeking the Presidency, principally for sordid gain, and to gratify the most selfish ambition.

I trust that the time may never come when the love of fame shall cease to be the sovereign passion of public men.

Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.

The hazards of politics come not from campaigns and elections, as might be supposed, but rather from the nature of the creature that engages in politics. Ambition, love, jealousy, hate and the many emotions and reactions man is heir to frequently affect the course of nation and world more than principles or circumstances or events.

A politician cannot separate his own personal advantage from his own political advantage.

Short-sighted is the philosophy which counts on selfishness as the master motive of human action.

Self-interest is not only a legitimate but a fundamental cause for national policy—one which needs no cloak of hypocrisy.

Everybody has an agenda.

Most politicians make decisions based on their own best interest rather than the greater good.

A politician will do anything to keep his job—even become a patriot.