Career Politics Quotes

I hadn't really thought about politics as a career in my twenties or early thirties.

Ed Rogers is a career insider who has personally enriched himself off of what he decries.

No doubt the ridiculous politicians are right to like politics. They have found careers in which success can be achieved by being ridiculous. Imagine Jimmy Carter or George W. Bush rising to the top of any other profession.

Washington was a swamp. It was not somewhere that they believed people would want to go, so the idea was that people got involved as a public service, not to make a career out of it.

Washington is deeply frustrating because so many of the positions that politicians hold are a product of ephemeral self-interest. They reverse themselves, for themselves, all the time.

The member of Congress who is not making a career of politics looks quite differently at the world.

One of the melancholy facts of political life is that your convictions tend to align with your paycheck.

For much of my career I had no authentic political voice. I had been campaigning all over the country not to change the world or shake up my audiences but to please the roomful of people to whom I was speaking... As a result, my words rarely had the ring of truth to the nonpolitical observer.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

I don't have a vested interest in a particular political career or a particular political office. My job is to do everything that I can to create an America and a world that we can live in and that we can survive in.

I'm not a career politician, so the ways of Washington may be a little obscure to me.

We only have politicians who are concerned with being reelected.

I never believed that my service in the U.S. Congress should become a permanent career.

Like all born politicians, their eye was for the main chance rather than for the argument, and they found it easier to forswear a conviction than to forego a comfort.

As more time passes, people see my father for what he is - one of the last of a generation who went into government to answer a call to public service rather than to pursue a career in politics.

After a great deal of thought and discussions with my family, I have decided not to seek re-election in 2014. Politics shouldn't be a career, and I never intended to make it one.

Once it becomes impossible for members of Congress to make a career of legislative service, the temptation to bend a vote for whatever reason may yield to the better angels of their nature.

One thing was very clear and I made it always very clear at the beginning when I got into the governorship, and that was that I wasn't trying to become a career politician. This was not like I was going to be governor for seven years and then I was going to run for the Senate and then for Congress. That was never my interest.

My political science degree is always on the back-burner. I took my LSAT, so even if I want to take the LSAT again, I know what I'm getting into. I'll keep it on the back-burner. Who knows, maybe with my popularity, I can have a career in politics with a law degree. I think it'll work out either way.

I never liked the atmosphere of Washington . I early saw that it was impossible to build up a race of which the leaders were spending most of their time, thought and energy in trying to get into office, or in trying to stay there after they were in.

I have run across characters in my political career that have that singular focus of being someone, being in a position of power.

I'm always amazed how many politicians have a very unlikely story, and when I talk to groups of students, I remind them that not everybody who gets into politics is a lawyer or went to school to study it. We all come to it for different reasons.

It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.