Politician Integrity Quotes

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

Has Bill Clinton inspired idealism in the young, as he himself was inspired by John F. Kennedy? Or has he actually reduced their idealism? Surely part of the answer lies in Clinton's personal moral lapse with Monica Lewinsky. But more important was his sin of omission - his failure to embrace a moral cause beyond popularity.

It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.

I don't want to help a politician revise the truth.

I think here in Beauce, people are very honest. And they don't like a politician that will say something one day and the opposite the other day.

The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy - then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece. Probably the rarest form of life in American politics is the man who can turn on a crowd & still keep his head straight - assuming it was straight in the first place.

For any politician who didn't enter office a wealthy man, nothing says 'I take bribes' like a Rolex watch.

Barack Obama isn't the first politician to break a promise, torture the truth or outright lie to the American people. But, he certainly is among the most accomplished at it.

Major danger lie for America? That we could very well be defeated oversees and at home. And the source of it is clearly that we have yet to find a politician in either partywho's willing to tell the American people the truth.

Wisdom comes from experience. Handling the people's money is not a job for a politician. There's too much temptation. It might be good to let an elderly man handle your money. He's looking for the Golden Gate, not the Golden Calf.

We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about. People matter more than Wall Street.

A 'penchant for telling the truth' can cripple a candidates chances faster than being caught in flagrante delicto with the governor's wife.

What is any political campaign save a concerted effort to turn out a set of politicians who are admittedly bad and put in a set who are thought to be better. The former assumption, I believe is always sound; the latter is just as certainly false. For 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.

Indians mock their corrupt politicians relentlessly, but they regard their honest politicians with silent suspicion. The first thing they do when they hear of a supposedly 'clean' politician is to grin. It is a cliche that honest politicians in India tend to have dishonest sons, who collect money from people seeking an audience with Dad.

Over on the Democratic side, Martin O'Malley recently spoke about the need for Wall Street reform and said that he isn't running for president to be quote, 'wined and dined' by executives. Then Chris Christie said, 'And I am also not running to be wined.'

Donald Trump did question Ted Cruz's evangelical credentials. Remember when Trump said, "How can somebody who lies as much as Ted Cruz lies be an evangelical Christian?"

Don't you dare besmirch the name of Congress. They are patriotic Americans trying to dress and feed themselves.

Boris [Johnson] was cavalier with assurances he made. We're picking a prime minister here to lead the country, not a school prefect.

When politics is no longer a mission but a profession, politicians become more self-serving than public servants.

I should prefer to have a politician who regularly went to a massage parlour than one who promised a laptop computer for every teacher.

I actually never thought that Barack Obama was anything but a typical Democratic party politician, which to me meant that he was probably in bed with Wall Street.

No politician ever admits where all his money comes from.

There aren’t many honest men or women in Washington anymore. Politicians get where they are by the sheer force of their egos, not their convictions. And you know what? It’s our fault as voters. We don’t demand better candidates, so we end up getting what we deserve—on both sides of the aisle.

What generally happens in this county is that our politicians don't serve us well because they don't tell the truth, and they don't keep their promises.