St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 86.

But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.

Sure, the book's either an advertisement for Catholicism or thinly veiled communist propaganda (St. More is the only Christian to be honored with a statue at the Kremlin, courtesy Lenin), but I can't help but feel that this statement -- one of the core rules of his fictional Utopia -- holds some bearing in our current times.