Quotes About Partisanship

The challenge in working in politics, particularly if you're working for a political party, is that everyone's a messenger.

The American people are quite competent to judge a political party that works both sides of a street.

That's another thing about the emotions: they make us take sides.

I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them -- one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.

A blue dog, you know, is the opposite of a yellow dog. And a yellow dog was somebody who was willing to follow his party even when he knew it was wrong.

This thing has been studied to death by Republicans and Democrats: several committees, including in Congress, that have all said, 'Yes, of course what happened was tragic, but Secretary Clinton was not in any way at fault,' and what you have here with these e-mails is basically a witch hunt.

I became a Republican when a very wise young lady asked me how I could remain a Democrat when I didn't agree with what they stood for and did agree with what the Republicans supported.

We need to understand that in the end, if we're going to make a positive difference in the future, we can't have election cycles where one side, the middle and the right side, they talk trash.

Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he's treated.

The black vote is always important, and the reason is it serves as a tremendous base for the Democratic Party. On the national level, Democrats traditionally receive at least 90 percent of the black vote.

Women, if left to their own devices, are going to tend and trend Democratic. That is absolutely the case.

The partisanship surrounding space exploration and the retrenching of U.S. space policy are part of a more general trend: the decline of science in the United States. As its interest in science wanes, the country loses ground to the rest of the industrialized world in every measure of technological proficiency.

I'm perhaps not the most tribal of politicians. Working in a mature and adult way where you recognise what your shared goal is and you manage to work towards that... that is not something which I think would be particularly more difficult with Labour than it is with the Conservatives.

I'm so bored of tribal politics. That's part of the problem. I'm so bored of it. I'm not a tribalist. That's not what turns me on.

As our politics have become more polarized, the essential loyalties shift from ideas to parties to tribes to individuals. Nothing else ultimately matters.

President Obama's record on national security is a tribute to his strength, and judgment, and to his preference for inclusion and partnership over partisanship.

The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.

My take is this. The Republicans control the Senate. They have the majority of the House, and they have the White House. They can do whatever they want to do, really.

In experiments using MRI scans, Westen has demonstrated that persons with partisan preferences believe what they want to believe regardless of the facts. Not only that, they unconsciously congratulate themselves—the reward centers of their brains light up—when they reject new information that does not square with their predetermined views.

In one test, subjects were presented with contradictory statements made by George Bush and John Kerry. Republicans judged Kerry's flip-flop harshly, while letting Bush off the hook for his. Democrats did the reverse. Interestingly, the brain scans showed that the parts of the brain governing emotion were far more active during the experiment than the reasoning parts.

The fruit of hyper-partisanship and a toxic informational environment is paralysis—paralysis at a moment of peril.

The norm of bipartisan agreement has been shattered forever and, once shattered, it cannot be put back together.

which approach is more scientific: Aristotle's, which is explicitly and necessarily evaluative, which offers advice and exhortation about how to care for the political order, or contemporary political science, which claims to be neutral and nonpartisan, but which smuggles its values and preferences in through the back door.

The Republican party is not perfect, but if you put this party's record of achievements on one side of a balance scale and the Democrat's record on the other, the Republican side would slam the table.