Quotes About Politics

The measure of our political and cultural health cannot be whether we all agree on all things at all times. We don't, and we won't. Disagreement and debate—including ferocious disagreement and exhausting debate—are hallmarks of American politics.

That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

House. "There are few things wholly evil, or wholly good. Almost everything, especially of governmental policy, is an inseparable compound of the two; so that our best judgment of the preponderance between them is continually demanded." That, Lincoln understood, was the moral work of politics: to make the good outweigh the bad.

One need not become a candidate (though that's certainly an option worth considering) or a political addict hooked on every twist and every turn and every tweet. But the paying of attention, the expressing of opinion, and the casting of ballots are foundational to living up to the obligations of citizenship in a republic.

So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States' rights were the salvation of the Founders' vision. White supremacy was to be protected

political war was to be the rule, not the exception, in American life. "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense," Adams wrote during Jefferson's first term.12

Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep for fear that I will wake up and our democracy will be gone and never return.

In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power's sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive

All men," Homer wrote, "have need of the gods," and the secular wish to banish religion from the public square is perennial but doomed—one might as well try to eliminate economics, geography, or partisanship as forces that shape our politics. The more productive task is to manage and marshal the effects of religious feeling on the broader republic.

philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson's genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power.

he wanted to win. Republicans in the Texas of 1963–64 were Goldwater men, not Rockefeller men. So George Bush was a Goldwater man.

This isn't fair, Dad," Jeb said. "This isn't fair to you." His father cut him off. "What are you talking about, fair?" Bush said. This was politics; this was real life. "Nobody owes us a damn thing. We're going to leave this city with our heads high and I don't want to hear that anymore." Bushes didn't whine. "Do your best and don't look back"—that was the code.

The GOP, Truman said, was more interested in partisan advantage than in national security.

Finally, at one p.m. on Tuesday, February 17, 180161, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Jefferson prevailed. R

The courts, the press, and two presidents (Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge) took stands, however limited, against the politics of fear.

This book is a portrait of hours in which the politics of fear were prevalent—a reminder that periods of public dispiritedness are not new and a reassurance that they are survivable.

If the President's theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion," Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, "then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.

Watergate is a shabby, tawdry business that demeans the Presidency. Am I failing to lead by not stating that?

And where will it all end? Shall we sometime see Republicans excluding Democrats and Democrats excluding Republicans from our law-making bodies, on the ground that the other party's principles are 'inimical to the best interests' of the United States?

Experience teaches us that men who are equally wise and good may differ in political as well

A willingness to wage constant partisan combat, no matter what the issue, was an emerging requirement in the politics coming into being in the 1830s. Party

the fact that we have arrived at a place in the life of the nation where a grand wizard of the KKK can claim, all too plausibly, that he is at one with the will of the president of the United States seems an unprecedented moment.

By closing our minds to the even remote possibility that a political leader with whom we nearly always disagree might have a point about a particular matter is to preemptively surrender the capacity of the mind to shape our public lives.

To Randolph the answer was self-evident. Jefferson had proved too much of a compromiser. Moderation, Randolph said, was "the mask which ambition has worn" through the ages.27 By the last year of the president's term, Randolph would tell James Monroe, "The old republican party is already ruined, past redemption."28 Jefferson