Top 464 Partisan Quotes & Sayings - Page 8

Today, the District of Columbia has more residents than at least two other states; Puerto Rico has more than 20. With numbers like that, admitting either or both to the union is less a political power play on the Democrats' part than the late-19th-century partisan move that still warps American politics.

A jurist can obey the letter of the law and violate its spirit, or it can follow the spirit of the law and violate the letter of the law. I want someone who can reconcile the letter and the spirit of the law without partisan leanings.

I was morose that the Era of Barack Obama has returned us to a period where everything is racist, everyone is walking on eggshells, and you get the moral preening from white liberals who don't actually even know any black people. But, oh, do they love to get on their high horses and accuse Republicans of being racist for opposing very liberal government policies and a very liberal Democratic president. It's an extension of the civil rights label being slapped on gay marriage and abortion. Allow me to be bi-partisan for a moment, and love this moment because it won't last long.

Even in Madison’s day, the practice of gerrymandering for partisan advantage was familiar. In the late seventeen-eighties, there were claims that Patrick Henry had tried to gerrymander Madison himself out of the First Congress. The term was coined during Madison’s Presidency, to mock Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts, who in 1811 approved an election district that was said to look like a salamander.

If fake news that's being released by some foreign government is almost identical to reports that are being issued through partisan news venues, then it's not surprising that that foreign propaganda will have a greater effect, because it doesn't seem that far-fetched compared to some of the other stuff that folks are hearing from domestic propagandists.

Look. Every partisan in every party has to learn one thing: Sometimes your people are wrong. To paraphrase an old retort, saying "My party, right or wrong" is like saying "My Kennedy, drunk or sober." Credibility is earned, and standing up and saying "Fie!" now and then reinforces your truthfulness.

I'm fighting for real change, not just partisan change where everybody else gets rich but you. I'm fighting all of us across the country are fighting for peaceful regime change in our own country. The media donor political complex that's bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by, and for the people.

Right-wing propagandists like Limbaugh and Coulter are essentially entertainers, entertainers who stimulate prejudice, selfishness and meanness the way a comedian works for laughs or a tragedian plays for tears. Theirs is a new art form, exclusive to America and bewilderingly successful. In place of traditional conservative ideology, they offer their audience partisan belligerence and a complete package of mail-order hatreds, designed for the conceptually and ethically impaired.

Incivility is a symptom, not the disease. We've always had partisan conflict in Congress, and we always will. Yet when I worked for a year (1970-71) on the staff of Sen. Ed Muskie of Maine, this was a different place, more collegial, more sensitive to data, more concerned about all of the American people. I think because the for-profit media prizes conflict above cooperation and sound bites above analysis, politicians have learned to adapt to those tendencies. Consequently, our public debates are dumbed down as our problems grow more complex.

We have Americans who are voting for someone in whom they have confidence, about whom they have hope, because at after the election 2016 whoever wins is going to have to govern. And when you look at the tenor of this campaign, and when you look at the way people feel about these candidates and how partisan our country is for starters, how does the winner govern? I mean that's the real, real problem.

[Wendy] Davis [pursued] higher education, as her campaign website says, with 'the help of academic scholarships, student loans, and state and federal grants.' Now that she is in a high-profile and hotly partisan race, it has come out that she also benefited from the moral and financial support of her second - now ex - husband. In the process, though, behavior we would expect and hardly notice in a man is being portrayed as freakish and problematic in a woman.

Being an American journalist can put people on the defensive. In countries where people assume the press is partisan, like in Lebanon, or where it had essentially become an extension of the government, like in Iraq, people tend to see a journalist as an agent of his or her government. That can be dangerous if the United States military is occupying their country, or aligned with their enemies.

The amount of interaction, the amount of understanding that exists in your generation among people of different races and different creeds and different colors is unprecedented. And by the way, that goes - that cuts across party lines, that cuts across partisan lines.

The Federalist Society is this conservative legal organization. And I think, for the Bush administration, being a member of the Federalist Society meant you were - a reliable, ideological, partisan Republican. It wasn't enough just to be registered as a Republican, or to be - have a generally conservative judicial philosophy, or prosecutorial philosophy. It meant that, basically, meant that you were a real movement conservative, a Party regular. That's what being a Federalist Society member means.

It does look like it's almost like South Africa to this extent: You have a white - what's the word - feeble minority. It's losing its majority status. And it says, the Republican Party, 'We can only get so many white votes. So, we got to reduce the votes of others.' It does look that way. Only the - maybe you're non-partisan, but only Republicans have pushed this in these 31 states. No Democratic legislature. You gotta look at the pattern here. You talk about profiling. I'm sorry, Republicans do this stuff.

If we think that we can secure our country by just talking tough without acting tough and smart, then we will misunderstand this moment and miss its opportunities. If we think that we can use the same partisan playbook where we just challenge our opponent's patriotism to win an election, then the American people will lose. The times are too serious for this kind of politics.

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

There are two outstanding issues in democratic politics these days. One is the relationship with the media, which is now 24/7, and operates with a completely different intensity than even 15 or 20 years ago. How do we have a proper conversation between leaders and country when it's moderated sometimes in a very partisan and inflammatory way? And the second thing is the effectiveness of our democracy. How do we get the right gene and talent pool in politics?

Of all the officers of the Government, those of the Department of Justice should be kept most free from any suspicion of improper action on partisan or factional grounds, so that there shall be gradually a growth, even though a slow growth, in the knowledge that the Federal courts and the representatives of the Federal Department of Justice insist on meting out even-handed justice to all.

When it comes to partisan politics, everyone is a hypocrite. And all they care about is whether it hurts or helps them ... Is it good or bad for the Democrats? Is it good or bad for the Republicans? Is it good or bad for Jews, or good or bad for blacks, or is it good or bad for women? Is it good or bad for men? Is it good or bad for gays? That's the way people think about issues today. There is very little discussion of enduring principles.

Michigan's problems are not partisan problems. Potholes are not political. There is no such thing as Republican or Democratic school kids or drinking water. These challenges affect us all. They make Michigan a harder place to get ahead. A harder place to raise a family. A harder place to run a business.

If you can look back and say, "The economy's better. Our security's better. The environment's better. Our kids' education is better," if you can say that you've made things better, then considering all the challenges out there, you should feel good. But I'm the first to acknowledge that I did not crack the code in terms of reducing this partisan fever.

The job of a leader, the job of a governor, the job of a president, is to get the people in the room and bang enough heads together and rub enough arms and cajole enough to have them put the country and the state's greater interest ahead of their own personal partisan interest. That's what we did in New Jersey and that's the model for America.

To the extent that our political dialogue is such where everything is under suspicion, everybody is corrupt and everybody is doing things for partisan reasons, and all of our institutions are full of malevolent actors - if that's the storyline that's being put out there by whatever party is out of power, then when a foreign government introduces that same argument with facts that are made up, voters who have been listening to that stuff for years, who have been getting that stuff every day from talk radio or other venues, they're going to believe it.

Most writers begin with accounts of their first home, their family, and the town, often from quite a hostile point of view-love/hate, let's say. In a way, this stepping outside, in an attempt to judge enough to create a duplicate of it, makes you an outsider. . . . I think it's healthy for a writer to feel like an outsider. If you feel like an insider you get committed to a partisan view, you begin to defend interests, so you wind up not really empathizing with all mankind.

ACORN, you may recall, is the left-wing activist group with longtime ties to community organizer-turned-President Barack Obama. The nonprofit, which now takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers after four decades on the public teat, has a history of engaging in voter fraud, corporate shakedowns, partisan bullying and pro-illegal immigration lobbying. The Democrats' stimulus proposals could make the group - and its lesser known but even more radical ideological allies - eligible for upward of $5 billion in new public cash.

I think it's a good thing that we can have relatively non-partisan political conversations because I don't think that my premier necessarily should agree with everything the federal NDP says. I don't think she should disagree with everything the federal Conservatives say. I think that Albertans and Canadians as a whole, as I always say, are looking for pragmatic politicians with pragmatic solutions to their problems, and they want the best ideas to move forward, regardless of who has that idea.

It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism - a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization - became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent - not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself - became the highest virtue.

We need to review the process for the election of Speaker. We've got to reform Question Time, which is really a waste of time. There are so many things that we need to do to reform our Parliament and I think it's bigger than that. It's all about the sort of leadership that people are getting at the moment. They're fed up with this sorta day-to-day bickering, not putting the national interest ahead of these narrow partisan interests.

Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

The left think that this special place in the world, the United States of America, it just happened. It just is. And it's our responsibility, as those who are lucky and fortunate enough, to happen to have been born here. It is incumbent upon us to share that same luck and good fortune with everybody else. Otherwise we are mean, selfish, polarized, partisan, extremist, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe, whatever.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

Partisanship should be kept out of the pulpit... The blindest of partisans are preachers. All politicians expect and find more candor, fairness, and truth in politicians than in partisan preachers. They are not replied to - no chance to reply to them.... The balance wheel of free institutions is free discussion. The pulpit allows no free discussion.

Because so many poets have chosen a political idiom right now in the US and so many poets have assigned value and inherent knowledge to their racial identity and used that as a form of argumentation, I'm thinking now's a good time to buy low for my own poems and write poems that are deeply in the interior and the psyche. There are plenty of people out there working on subjects of political poetry, partisan poetry, all the way through to crossing the threshold of propaganda. I start thinking now's a good time for me to start writing about the myths of my own psyche.

Because I didn't see war in Iraq through the partisan lens that seems to dominate a lot of the perspective today with Fox News on the one side and MSNBC on the other, I didn't see it as Democrats good, Republicans bad. I saw it as a situation where the United States is a force that engages in these military operations around the world, and it's the job of journalists to provide the American people with information they can use to make informed decisions.

Confronting the US made him [Hugo Chavez] a target for demonization. Partisan and/or lazy journalism exaggerated his faults, ignored his virtues, and downplayed the influence of strident and on occasion anti-democratic opponents. The flip side is his anti-imperialist posturing so dazzled his cheerleaders they overlooked his flaws, flaws which worsened over time, and they created their own caricature.

The rules in this new 'post-partisan' era are pretty simple: If the Democratic Party wants it, it's 'stimulus.' If the Republican Party opposes it, it's 'politics' - as in headlines like this: 'Obama Urges GOP To Keep Politics To A Minimum On Stimulus.' These are serious times: As the president says, it's the worst economic crisis since the Thirties. So politicians need to put politics behind them and immediately lavish $4.19 billion on his community-organizing pals at the highly inventive 'voter registration' group ACORN for 'neighborhood stabilization activities.

For all the talk about the bitterness and the partisanship in American politics, is it really that bitter and partisan? Think of American history. Think of Joseph McCarthy. Think of the New Left. Think of [George] McGovern. Think of [Ronald] Reagan. Think of George Wallace. We've had an awful lot of real extremism on both wings.

There are three popular theories being bandied about to explain Robert Mueller investigation, but we have to remember that it was the Donald Trump administration that decided to do this. Mueller is hiring some of the biggest Democrat lawyer donors he can find. He's hired huge donors to Barack Obama, huge donors to Hillary Clinton. He has hired fundraising lawyers, I mean, people that are lawyers in their private sector lives who have bundled and raised money. There are some on his staff who aren't, but it's noteworthy for all of the partisan leftists that Mueller has hired.

Political elites vote in a more partisan fashion than the mass public; this tendency, too, follows a curve. The more you know, the more likely you are to vote in an ideologically consistent way, not just following your party but following a set of constraints dictated by a political ideology.

That, in part, is why the Constitution's framers gave justices life tenure ? to enable them to rule wherever the law and the Constitution led them, without obligation or fear of political reprisal. Former Republican president Gerald Ford recently paid tribute to John Paul Stevens, his only appointee to the Supreme Court, who is also far more liberal than Republicans expected. He has served his nation well, ... with dignity, intellect and without partisan political concerns.

All of us in government service were elected to solve the problems that have plagued our nation. We are here to think big, to act boldly, and to rise above the petty, partisan squabbling of Washington, D.C. We are here to take action. It's time to start building our country with American workers and with American iron and aluminum and steel. It's time to put up soaring new infrastructure that inspires pride in our people and our towns. It is time at last to put America first.

I am a convinced and consistent critic of party-parliamentarism. I am for non-partisan elections of true people's representatives who are accountable to their regions and districts; and who in case of unsatisfactory work can be recalled. I do understand and respect the formation of groups on economical, cooperative, territorial, educational, professional and industrial principles, but I see nothing organic in political parties. Politically motivated ties can be unstable and quite often they have selfish ulterior motives.

The thing that is different I think from the years ago, when I was covering the shutdown at the Clinton White House. Then, it was a different political landscape. At that point, a third of House Republicans in the 1995 shutdown were in congressional districts that had been won by Bill Clinton. 7 percent of House Republicans are in congressional districts that were won by Barack Obama shows you how much more partisan the whole country is. A lot of the bridges that used to be used to reach a deal when you needed to reach a compromise have been blown up in the past years.