A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him he's a statesman.

A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.

I want people who follow politics to understand that in politics everything is structured. Your political opponent hires experts, analysts, those people who shed a negative light on the other side.

The politician is...trained in the art of inexactitude. His words tend to be blunt or rounded, because if they have a cutting edge they may later return to wound him.

Politics, I now understand, is at its best when it enlightens us via an opponent's insight.

A politician is anyone who asks individuals to surrender part of their liberty — their power and privilege — to State, Masses, Mankind, Planet Earth, or whatever. This state, those masses, that mankind, and the planet will then be run by ... politicians

A politician, a man engaged in party contests, must be an opportunist. Let us give up saying that word as if it contained a slur. If you want to win in party action, I take it for granted that you want to lure the majority to your side. I never heard of any man in his senses who was fishing for a minority.

I'm proud that I'm a politician. A politician is a man who understands government, and it takes a politician to run a government. A statesman is a politician who's been dead 10 or 15 years.

A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.

a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man

The academic politician is interested in victory. He has the moral code of Machiavelli, but, because he is too impatient to submit to the instruction of history, he has not the old master’s shrewd sense of human limitations and contradictions. He makes the worst of rulers: he is neither a lover of truth, nor a practical man of the world, nor an habitual examiner of his all-too-human and persistent failings.

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When he wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of an edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

Unlike prime ministers, leaders of the Opposition suffer from the handicap that often their only weapons are words, not deeds. That's why their actions in how they deal with their own party are used as a proxy for leadership.