Quotations for Election Day | Quotes, Thoughts, Sayings about Elections

The wonderful thing about food is you get three votes a day. Every one of them has the potential to change the world. ~ Michael Pollan

If God wanted us to vote, he would have given us candidates.  ~Jay Leno

An election is coming.  Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.  ~George Eliot, Felix Holt, Chapter 5

The politicians were talking themselves red, white and blue in the face.  ~Clare Boothe Luce

If the World Series runs until election day, the networks will run the first one-half inning and project the winner.  ~Lindsey Nelson

Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.  ~Sydney J. Harris

A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy, but won’t cross the street to vote in a national election.  ~Bill Vaughan

It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.  ~Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Politicians and diapers should be changed frequently and all for the same reason.  ~José Maria de Eça de Queiroz, translated from Portuguese

Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.  ~W.C. Fields

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.  ~George Jean Nathan

How come we choose from just two people to run for president and 50 for Miss America?  ~Author Unknown

There are always too many Democratic congressmen, too many Republican congressmen, and never enough U.S. congressmen.  ~Author Unknown

Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?  ~Robert Orben

Why pay money to have your family tree traced; go into politics and your opponents will do it for you.  ~Author Unknown

Democracy is being allowed to vote for the candidate you dislike least.  ~Robert Byrne

Our political institutions work remarkably well.  They are designed to clang against each other.  The noise is democracy at work.  ~Michael Novak

A politician should have three hats.  One for throwing into the ring, one for talking through, and one for pulling rabbits out of if elected.  ~Carl Sandburg

I’m tired of hearing it said that democracy doesn’t work.  Of course it doesn’t work.  We are supposed to work it.  ~Alexander Woollcott

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.  ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827

People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people.  Of course, that is not true.  Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote – a very different thing.  ~Walter H. Judd

If we got one-tenth of what was promised to us in these acceptance speeches there wouldn’t be any inducement to go to heaven.  ~Will Rogers

Our presidential race is beginning to sound more and more like Harry Potter’s duel with the Ministry of Magic.  ~Dave Beard, 2008 Aug 02, during the Obama-McCain race

 

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.  ~Henry Cate, VII

The most important political office is that of the private citizen.  ~Louis Brandeis

Politics, it seems to me, for years, or all too long, has been concerned with right or left instead of right or wrong.  ~Richard Armour

Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich, by promising to protect each from the other.  ~Oscar Ameringer

If con is the opposite of pro, is Congress the opposite of progress?  ~Author Unknown

Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.  ~Gore Vidal

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could become President; I’m beginning to believe it.  ~Clarence Darrow

Truth is not determined by majority vote.  ~Doug Gwyn

George Washington is the only president who didn’t blame the previous administration for his troubles.  ~Author Unknown

Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assassination of nearly every political practitioner in the country – and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.  ~Charles Krauthammer

Mankind will never see an end of trouble until… lovers of wisdom come to hold political power, or the holders of power… become lovers of wisdom.  ~Plato, The Republic

Don’t vote, it only encourages them. ~Billy Connolly, An Audience with Billy Connolly, 1985

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.  ~H.L. Mencken, 1956

Take our politicians:  they’re a bunch of yo-yos.  The presidency is now a cross between a popularity contest and a high school debate, with an encyclopedia of cliches the first prize.  ~Saul Bellow

In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant.  ~Charles de Gaulle

Democracy consists of choosing your dictators, after they’ve told you what you think it is you want to hear.  ~Alan Coren

We have plenty of Confidence in this country, but we are a little short of good men to place our Confidence in.  ~Will Rogers

Applause, mingled with boos and hisses, is about all that the average voter is able or willing to contribute to public life.  ~Elmer Davis

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal – that you can gather votes like box tops – is… the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.  ~Adlai Stevenson, speech, Democratic National Convention, 18 August 1956

I offer my opponents a bargain:  if they will stop telling lies about us, I will stop telling the truth about them.  ~Adlai Stevenson, campaign speech, 1952

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.  ~Alexis de Tocqueville

We would all like to vote for the best man but he is never a candidate.  ~Frank McKinney “Kin” Hubbard

We have, I fear, confused power with greatness.  ~Stewart Udall

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.  ~James Harvey Robinson, The Human Comedy, 1937

When one may pay out over two million dollars to presidential and Congressional campaigns, the U.S. government is virtually up for sale.  ~John Gardner

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman thinks of the next generation.  ~James Freeman Clarke, Sermon

During a campaign the air is full of speeches – and vice versa.  ~Author Unknown

If a politician murders his mother, the first response of the press or of his opponents will likely be not that it was a terrible thing to do, but rather that in a statement made six years before he had gone on record as being opposed to matricide.  ~Meg Greenfield

American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age.  ~Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.  ~Emma Goldman

A man that’d expict to thrain lobsters to fly in a year is called a loonytic; but a man that thinks men can be tur-rned into angels by an iliction is called a rayformer an’ remains at large.  ~Finley Peter Dunne, Mr. Dooley’s Philosophy, 1900

The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.  ~Winston Churchill

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.  ~James Russell Lowell

Democracy:  The state of affairs in which you consent to having your pocket picked, and elect the best man to do it.  ~Benjamin Lichtenberg

The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.  ~Karl Marx

Ohio claims they are due a president as they haven’t had one since Taft.  Look at the United States, they have not had one since Lincoln.  ~Will Rogers

Ancient Rome declined because it had a Senate, now what’s going to happen to us with both a House and a Senate?  ~Will Rogers