Adlai Stevenson:

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

Ambrose Bierce:

An election is nothing more than the advanced auction of stolen goods.

Barbara Kingsolver:

Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work - that goes on, it adds up.

Bernard Baruch:

Vote for the man who promises least. He'll be the least disappointing.

Bill Stern:

Our elections are free - it's in the results where eventually we pay.

Bill Vaughan:

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

Carl Sandburg:

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.

Dick Gregory:

Political promises are much like marriage vows. They are made at the beginning of the relationship between candidate and voter, but are quickly forgotten.

Donna Brazile:

Look, Congress has allocated more money to finance the upcoming Iraqi elections than it has for the American elections. There's something wrong with that.

Felix Frankfurter:

Appeal must be to an informed, civically militant electorate.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

An election cannot give a country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in the same pod.

Franklin Pierce Adams:

Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody.

G. K. Chesterton:

The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.

George Bernard Shaw:

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Jean Nathan:

Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.

George W. Bush:

It's exciting; I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes.

Gore Vidal:

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

Herbert Marcuse:

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

John Adams:

Where annual elections end, there slavery begins.

John Bright:

Demand the ballot as the undeniable right of every man who is called to the poll, and take special care that the old constitutional rule and principle, by which majorities alone shall decide in Parliamentary elections, shall not be violated.

Leonid Brezhnev:

The trouble with free elections is, you never know who is going to win.

Lillian Hellman:

Decision by democratic majority vote is a fine form of government, but it's a stinking way to create.

Lily Tomlin:

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them.

Lord Acton:

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the party that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.

Lyndon B. Johnson:

We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.

Maureen Reagan:

I will feel equality has arrived when we can elect to office women who are as incompetent as some of the men who are already there.

Niccolo Machiavelli:

Each candidate behaved well in the hope of being judged worthy of election. However, this system was disastrous when the city had become corrupt. For then it was not the most virtuous but the most powerful who stood for election, and the weak, even if virtuous, were too frightened to run for office.

Otto von Bismarck:

People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.

P. J. O'Rourke:

Then there's politics. Just imagine politics with its dumbbell element subtracted. There would be no Republican candidates. There would be no Democratic voters. The whole system would collapse.

P. J. O'Rourke:

In our brief national history we have shot four of our presidents, worried five of them to death, impeached one and hounded another out of office. And when all else fails, we hold an election and assassinate their character.

Rosa Luxemburg:

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.

T. S. Eliot:

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Thomas Jefferson:

A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation.

W. C. Fields:

I never vote for anyone. I always vote against.

Walt Whitman:

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between [people], and their beliefs -- in religion, literature, colleges and schools -- democracy in all public and private life....

Will Rogers:

Elections are a good deal like marriages. There's no accounting for anyone's taste. Every time we see a bridegroom we wonder why she ever picked him, and it's the same with public officials.

Will Rogers:

I guess truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that can happen to you.

Winston Churchill:

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.