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.

Mencken's [very widely attributed, as yet unsourced] pat response to all angry letters:

A sandwich made up of two thick and tasteless chunks of Kriegsbrot with a couple of excellent sardines between.

A politician is an animal which can sit on a fence and yet keep both ears to the ground.