89 Inspiring Election Quotes

Elections are a cornerstone of democracy, encapsulating the hopes, dreams, and determination of people from all walks of life. They are more than just a process of casting votes; they represent the collective vision and the power of choice within a society. Throughout history, elections have inspired leaders, thinkers, and citizens alike to reflect on the essence of democracy and the role each individual plays in shaping their future. In this spirit, we have gathered a curated collection of 89 inspiring election quotes that capture the passion, wisdom, and optimism inherent in the democratic process. Whether you are seeking motivation or a deeper understanding of electoral dynamics, these quotes offer valuable insights into the enduring importance of participating in elections and the powerful impact of one’s voice and vote.

1. “The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” - Douglas Adams

2. “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.” - Theodore Roosevelt

3. “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.” - Gore Vidal

4. “The ballot is stronger than the bullet.” - Abraham Lincoln

5. “Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.” - herbert marcuse

6. “General Motors, General Mills, General Foods, general ignorance, general apathy, and general cussedness elect presidents and Congressmen and maintain them in power.” - Herbert M Shelton

7. “Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.” - Abraham Lincoln

8. “In proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected ruler’s increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals.” - Paul Lafargue

9. “When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.” - Thomas L. Friedman

10. “[The American President] has to take all sorts of abuse from liars and demagogues.… The people can never understand why the President does not use his supposedly great power to make ’em behave. Well, all the President is, is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.” - Harry S. Truman

11. “The changes that take place when liberal Democrats replace not so liberal or compassionate Republicans (or Democrats) are merely cosmetic. ” - David Dellinger

12. “What [Sarah] Palin so beguilingly represented ... was a form of female power that was utterly digestible to those who had no intellectual or political use for actual women: feminism without the feminists.” - Rebecca Traister

13. “This historic general election, which showed that the British are well able to distinguish between patriotism and Toryism, brought Clement Attlee to the prime ministership. In the succeeding five years, Labor inaugurated the National Health Service, the first and boldest experiment in socialized medicine. It took into public ownership all the vital (and bankrupted) utilities of the coal, gas, electricity and railway industries. It even nibbled at the fiefdoms and baronies of private steel, air transport and trucking. It negotiated the long overdue independence of India. It did all this, in a country bled white by the World War and subject to all manner of unpopular rationing and controls, without losing a single midterm by-election (a standard not equaled by any government of any party since). And it was returned to office at the end of a crowded term.” - Christopher Hitchens

14. “During the 1992 election I concluded as early as my first visit to New Hampshire that Bill Clinton was hateful in his behavior to women, pathological as a liar, and deeply suspect when it came to money in politics. I have never had to take any of that back, whereas if you look up what most of my profession was then writing about the beefy, unscrupulous 'New Democrat,' you will be astonished at the quantity of sheer saccharine and drool. Anyway, I kept on about it even after most Republicans had consulted the opinion polls and decided it was a losing proposition, and if you look up the transcript of the eventual Senate trial of the president—only the second impeachment hearing in American history—you will see that the last order of business is a request (voted down) by the Senate majority leader to call Carol and me as witnesses. So I can dare to say that at least I saw it through.” - Christopher Hitchens

15. “Remember one thing as South Africa prepares to go to the polls this week and the world grapples with the ascendancy of the African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma: South Africa is not Zimbabwe.In South Africa, no one doubts that Wednesday's elections will be free and fair. While there is an unacceptable degree of government corruption, there is no evidence of the wholesale kleptocracy of Robert Mugabe's elite. While there has been the abuse of the organs of state by the ruling ANC, there is not the state terror of Mugabe's Zanu-PF. And while there is a clear left bias to Zuma's ANC, there is no suggestion of the kind of voluntarist experimentation that has brought Zimbabwe to its knees.” - Mark Gevisser

16. “Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.” - Sarah Palin

17. “It’s not just tougher out there. It’s become a situation where the contest is how much you can destroy the system, rather than how much you can make it work. It makes no difference if you have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after your name. There’s no sense that this is about democracy, and after the election you have to work together, and knit the country together. The people in the game now just think to the first Tuesday in November, and not a day beyond it.” - Peter Hart

18. “Pops added,"you know, they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve.""And if you do, you never get the results you expected," (Katherine) replied.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

19. “Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used.” - Paul Collier

20. “The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It's come to the point where you almost can't run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.” - Hunter S. Thompson

21. “انتخابات مزورة، كل شخص في البلد يعلم انها مزورة، ومع ذلك يعترف بها رسمياً وتحكم بها البلاد، ويعني هذا أن يستقر في ضمير الشعب أن نوابه لصوص سرقوا كراسيهم، وأن وزراءه لصوص سرقوا بالتالي مناصبهم، وأن سلطاته وحكومته مزيفة مزورة، وأن السرقة والتزييف والتضليل مشروعة رسمياً.. ألا يعذر الرجل العادي إذا كفر بالمبادئ والخلق وآمن بالزيف والانتهازية؟” - نجيب محفوظ

22. “[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.” - George Packer

23. “When one with honeyed words but evil mindPersuades the mob, great woes befall the state.” - Euripides

24. “Political impotence is finished. Today is the beginning of the orgasm. All the people, I promise you, will feel the orgasm of next year's presidential election.” - Vladimir Zhirinovsky

25. “Every election is determined by the people who show up.” - Larry J. Sabato

26. “To win the people, always cook them some savoury that pleases them.” - Aristophanes

27. “The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.” - George Orwell

28. “To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.” - Matt Taibbi

29. “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best” - Otto von Bismarck

30. “It is truth, in the old saying, that is 'the daughter of time,' and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that 'history' had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.” - Christopher Hitchens

31. “But people love a hypocrite, you know——they recognize one of their own, and it always feels so good when someone gets caught with his pants down and his dick up and it isn't you.” - Stephen King

32. “In a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.” - Matt Taibbi

33. “Both groups [of pundits] were critics, and that is the heart of the problem. If you are a pundit, you seem so smart when you are telling the President what he did wrong… This [is] mostly BS.” - Jeffrey A. Miller

34. “Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

35. “Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

36. “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace--business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

37. “...they say if you don't vote, you get the government you deserve, and if you do, you never get the results you expected.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

38. “Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.” - Neil Postman

39. “The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable in negotiation, more imaginative in executive skill, more knowledgeable about international affairs, more understanding of the interrelations of economic systems, and so on. The reason has, almost entirely, to do with 'image.' But not because politicians are preoccupied with presenting themselves in the best possible light. After all, who isn't? It is a rare and deeply disturbed person who does not wish to project a favorable image. But television gives image a bad name. For on television the politician does not so much offer the audience an image of himself, as offer himself as an image of the audience. And therein lies one of the most powerful influences of the television commercial on political discourse.” - Neil Postman

40. “I've always found the thousand dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand dollar ones --- if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it's clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it's apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn't well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us. We're not worth it! I want to say. You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild's college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks. Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.” - Curtis Sittenfeld

41. “When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as 'enemies,' it's time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.” - Molly Ivins

42. “Presidents are not elected anymore; they are hired.” - Michel Templet

43. “Do the unexpected. Take 20 minutes out of your day, do what young people all over the world are dying to do: vote.” - Rick Mercer

44. “If the USA doesn't start learning how to put personal egos aside for the sustainability of a nation, then these "mighty" United States will be no better than the politically divided commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Where progress is slowed because each party thinks any idea from the other party must be stupid or without validity and Independence has become a distant dream squashed by corruption. I suggest politicians go back to kindergarten to learn the basics in decent humanity. The notions of sharing and respect obviously didn't stick the first time.” - Cristina Marrero

45. “One of the most unique aspects among many about the USA is that our transitions of 'power' have almost always been peaceful. This is very unique in all of history and in the world today".” - R. Alan Woods

46. “...la televisión condiciona fuertemente el proceso electoral, ya sea en la elección de los candidatos, bien en su modo de plantear la batalla electoral, o en la forma de ayudar a vencer al vencedor. Además, la televisión condiciona, o puede condicionar, fuertemente el gobierno, es decir, las decisiones del gobierno: lo que un gobierno puede y no puede hacer, o decidir lo que va a hacer.” - Giovanni Sartori

47. “It's an erectoral vote.... it doesn't mean dick.” - Robin Reardon

48. “Dictators are not in the business of allowing elections that could remove them from their thrones.” - Gene Sharp

49. “If you put your politicians up for sale, as the US does (alone in this among industrialized democracies), then someone will buy them--and it won’t be you; you can’t afford them.” - Juan Cole

50. “Voters inclined to loathe and fear elite Ivy League schools rarely make fine distinctions between Yale and Harvard. All they know is that both are full of rich, fancy, stuck-up and possibly dangerous intellectuals who never sit down to supper in their undershirt no matter how hot the weather gets.” - Russell Baker

51. “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” - Otto von Bismark

52. “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war, or before an election.” - Otto von Bismarck

53. “Options abound world over, Options to choose from and be the best.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

54. “God takes us through life`s journey. Always nudging our Spirits to go for plus and shun the minus.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

55. “Be positive at all times! Leave out the negatives.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

56. “There is a ladder to Success! Choose to climb it.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

57. “In your emotions: exercise Joy over sadness.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

58. “Ride higher in life unto the higher life.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

59. “Don`t descend to the lowest ebb.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

60. “Shout out for Joy! Don`t scream out in fear for victors shout and victims scream.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

61. “Don`t turn around in circles for making circles do not equate making progress.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

62. “Move forward for forward is progress but circles are movement.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

63. “Forget yesterday, Act on Today and Get a hold on tomorrow.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

64. “Life is beautiful if you take the best option.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

65. “It turns out horrendous when you choose the wrong options.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

66. “Decide to be rich! Hate poverty strong.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

67. “There is seed time and harvest, choose to sow at the right time so as to have a bountiful harvest.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

68. “Sow good seeds for a good yield.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

69. “Choices, options, decisions abound. Choose right, take the best option and decide well.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

70. “You have been called to a life of blessing, don`t descend to that of curses.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

71. “Build up your faith while starving the fears.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

72. “Avoid conflicts, Embrace cordiality.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

73. “Relish what is good and expedient.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

74. “Eschew evil and it`s machinations.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

75. “Sow the right words! Think the good thought.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

76. “Have the best course for all your actions.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

77. “Accept responsibilities for all your actions. Learn from your past and your mistakes.” - Agu Jaachynma N E

78. “Don`t complain, Don`t compromise.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

79. “Always contend for the good!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

80. “Stand out tall amidst challenges! Dwarf all irrelevant voices.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

81. “Shine forth your light before all beings.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

82. “Light is life and always wins.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

83. “Shun darkness and evil vices for they that embrace them wear off with time!” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

84. “Desire to give and not always receive.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

85. “The giver is the blessed! The receiver stands still.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

86. “Desire to impact lives! Change destinies and make dreams come true.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

87. “You are created with a mandate! You have all you need to fulfill it.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

88. “Voting is not a right. It is a method used to determine which politician was most able to brainwash you.” - Dennis E. Adonis

89. “In other words if a man is armed, then one pretty much has to take his opinions into account. One can see how this worked at its starkest in Xenophon’s Anabasis, which tells the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who suddenly find themselves leaderless and lost in the middle of Persia. They elect new officers, and then hold a collective vote to decide what to do next. In a case like this, even if the vote was 60/40, everyone could see the balance of forces and what would happen if things actually came to blows. Every vote was, in a real sense, a conquest.” - David Graeber