Quotes About Compromise

The absence of even rough agreement on the facts puts every opinion on equal footing and therefore eliminates the basis for thoughtful compromise. It rewards not those who are right, but those - like the White House press office - who can make their arguments most loudly, most frequently, most obstinately, and with the best backdrop.

So secure was his power that rumblings of discontent had finally surfaced within his own base, among black nationalists upset with his willingness to cut whites and Hispanics into the action, among activists disappointed with his failure to tackle poverty head-on, and among people who preferred the dream to the reality, impotence to compromise.

What had Frank called college? An advanced degree in compromise.

I realized that abiding by his rules would cost me little, but to him, it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did have a point, and in that insisting on getting my own way all the time without regard to his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself. ...In one form or another, it is what we all must go through in order to grow up.

No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.

We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

It is harder to end a war, than begin one.

What made some movements succeed where others failed? Was it a sign of success when portions of a cause were absorbed by conventional politics, or was it a sign that the cause had been hijacked? When was compromise acceptable and when was it selling out, and

Michelle shook her head and looked out the window. We both knew what I was asking for. Another disruption. Another gamble. Another step in the direction of something I wanted and she truly didn't. "This is it, Barack," Michelle said. "One last time. But don't expect me to do any campaigning. In fact, you shouldn't even count on my vote.

in 2007, the maverick version of John McCain, along with his sidekick Lindsey Graham, had actually joined Ted Kennedy to put together a comprehensive reform bill that offered citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants while more tightly securing our borders. Despite strong support from President Bush, it had failed to clear the Senate. The bill did, however, receive twelve Republican votes, indicating the real possibility of a future bipartisan accord. I'd

My anger when a young Kerry staffer informed us that I had to cut one of my favorite lines because the nominee intended to poach it for his own speech.

This idea of purity and you're never compromised, you're always politically woke and all that stuff. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities.

In their view, we'd compromised too much, and by continually chasing the false promise of bipartisanship, we'd not only empowered McConnell and squandered big Democratic majorities; we'd thrown a giant wet blanket over our base—as evidenced by the decision of so many Democrats to not bother to vote in the midterms.

Let's all sing the redneck national anthem: Settle for what you can get.

She married him two years ago for love, or so she thought, and he's a good enough man but a devotee of household silence. His idea of marriage is to spray WD-40 on anything that squeaks. ... The quiet only subsides when Harland sleeps and his tonsils make up for lost time.

If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels.

She climbs down and pours half an inch of Jim Beam into a Bengals mug that came free with a tank of gas. Alice would just as soon get her teeth cleaned as watch the Bengals. That's the price of staying around when your heart's not in it, she thinks. You get to be cheerleader for a sport you never chose.

We try to reason with one another, but only manage to tear ourselves apart.

Well, why were they dumb enough to vote for Leah anyway, is what I asked Nelson. If they knew it was going to get Tata Kuvudundu so riled up? Nelson said some of them that voted for her were put out with Tata Ndu, and some were put out with Father, so everybody ended up getting what they didn't want, and now had to go along with it. Nobody even cares that much one way or another about Leah, is what Nelson said. Oh, well, I told him. That is what we call Democracy.

they'd shared an exuberance that eventually suffocated under tenure applications and mortgages. This was not a new story. Maybe Iano still had access to that kind of joy, but she'd surrendered it as her half of the marital bargain.

You wind up meeting in the middle on this follow-your-heart thing, at a place everybody can live with. Show me that universe on TV or the movies. Mountain people, country and farm people, we are nowhere the hell. It's a situation, being invisible. You can get to a point of needing to make the loudest possible noise just to see if you are still alive.

Sometimes, you have to remind yourself the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Tatsu had pursued me for years, but more recently we had managed to achieve an improbable entente.

And divorce was the chemotherapy of marriage, so expensive and toxic that only couples in extremis would attempt it as a cure. And if half of marriages were so cancerous that they justified treatment with the equivalent of chemotherapy, what did that say about the others? How many of the nondivorced had just learned to live with the illness because the cure seemed even worse than the disease?