Top 121 Partisanship Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Before a community can prosper, the people must believe in their leaders. They must know that at the core of every decision is careful planning, hard work, and unbending integrity rather than partisanship or self-gain. They must trust that the awesome power of government is not being abused.

For all its faults, it is partisanship - based on core principles- that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders.

I worked on Capitol Hill for five years, and I saw how things work and how they do not. I saw the partisanship, the gridlock, the pettiness, and the corruption.

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment.

Officeholders are the agents of the people, not their masters. Not only is their time and labor due to the government, but they should scrupulously avoid in their political action, as well as in the discharge of their official duty, offending by a display of obtrusive partisanship their neighbors who have relations with them as public officials.

In short, I will never allow partisanship to undermine our national security when the lives of countless people lay in the balance. If that earns me enemies in Washington or at the State Department, then so be it.

Ratings are king and the money keeps flowing, and partisanship is so strong today that people rely on a few sources absolutely instead of thinking critically. So even being a cheerleader for a gameshow-host president with no respect for the rule of law or America's reputation in the world may not be a career-ending move.

We voted for Obama on rhetoric of 'hope and change.' We voted for him because of some idea that he was beyond politics and certainly beyond partisanship.

The ability of Republican leaders to rile up their base - helped along by folks like Rush Limbaugh, some commentators on Fox News - I think created an environment in which Republican voters would punish Republicans for cooperating with me. That hothouse of back-and-forth argument and - and really sharp partisanship I think has been harmful to America.

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.

My heart aches for less divisiveness, less polarization Less mindless partisanship, which at times sounds almost hateful to the ear of Americans. How we conduct ourselves and how we treat you, Judge Roberts, can be a great start toward reconciliation in our country.

I work with people. It's not about partisanship. I can't say this enough. It's about how do you set the tone to try to work together.

The Post-Dispatch will serve no party but the people; be no organ of Republicanism, but the organ of truth; will follow no causes bit its conclusions; will not support the Administration, but criticize it; will oppose all frauds and shams wherever or whatever they are; will advocate principles and ideas rather than prejudices and partisanship.

In the higher walks of politics the same sort of thing occurs. The statesman who has gradually concentrated all power within himself ... may have had anything but a public motive... The phrases which are customary on the platform and in the Party Press have gradually come to him to seem to express truths, and he mistakes the rhetoric of partisanship for a genuine analysis of motives... He retires from the world after the world has retired from him.

It is hard to put aside partisanship. It is hard to give up the easy wisecracking jeer that divides and destroys. It is hard - very hard - to have worked sincerely and wholeheartedly for a cause and to have lost. Most of all, it is hard to put aside personal prejudices. And yet we must put these things aside.

John McCain felt very strongly about virtually every issue that he tackled, but it was never based in partisanship. He didn't try to score partisan points as he worked on issues. He would work with anyone who wanted to accomplish the goal that he shared.

C. Everett 'Chic' Koop became U.S. Surgeon General under President Reagan. He was a world renowned pediatric surgeon who had a tumultuous Senate confirmation process due to partisanship. Chic took office in January 1982, a time of 'tobacco wars' and a new and evolving terrifying disease that we ultimately came to know as AIDS.

A paradigm shift is the best a scientist can hope for. Whenever I smell an opportunity like that, I go after it. You have a new discovery that something's working in a different way than you thought. And this is particularly true in molecular and cell biology, which is structural biology and has the least potential for controversy and partisanship among the biological scientists. You're dealing with a concrete object that's either there or not there.

Charleston has a landscape that encourages intimacy and partisanship. I have heard it said that an inoculation to the sights and smells of the Carolina lowcountry is an almost irreversible antidote to the charms of other landscapes, other alien geographies. You can be moved profoundly by other vistas, by other oceans, by soaring mountain ranges, but you can never be seduced. You can even forsake the lowcountry, renounce it for other climates, but you can never completely escape the sensuous, semitropical pull of Charleston and her marshes.

Humor can help you to disagree without being disagreeable. The key in democracy is not necessarily that we agree, but that we participate....Despite all the heavy problems- domestic and international- there is humor. Humor transcends partisanship.

The environmental agenda before the Congress includes laws to deal with water pollution, pesticide hazards, ocean dumping, excessive noise, careless land development and many other environmental problems. These problems will not stand still for politics or for partisanship.

I don't believe that the American people want us to focus on our job security. They want us to focus on their job security. I don't think they want more gridlock. I don't think they want more partisanship. I don't think they want more obstruction. They didn't send us to Washington to fight each other in some sort of political steel-cage match to see who comes out alive. That's not what they want. They sent us to Washington to work together, to get things done, and to solve the problems that they're grappling with every single day.

To the American people I say, awaken to what is happening. It is the duty of each citizen to be vigilant, to protect liberty, to speak out, left and right and disagree lest be trampled underfoot by misguided zealotry and extreme partisanship.

Truth gathers itself spotless and unhurt after all our surrenders and concealments and partisanship; never hurt by the treachery or ruin of its best defenders, whether Luther, or William Penn, or St. Paul.

In recurring episodes over the next couple of decades, the minority view gradually won. A profusion of factors differentiates each case from the others, including naked partisanship on both sides, but the trend has been clear.

Opting for conspiracy over facts and partisanship over constitutional principles, Democrats have chosen to ignore the damning evidence of wrongdoing by the Obama-era FBI.

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.

It seems very obvious that a vast majority of the American people are sick and tired of political correctness and prevailing partisanship that does not serve the American people or freedom well.

The past always seems somehow more golden, more serious, than the present. We tend to forget the partisanship of yesteryear, preferring to re-imagine our history as a sure and steady march toward greatness.

Hollywood is a very liberal community. There are a lot of guys that are also conservative that are frightened or fearful of being able to come out. And there's also the alternative. I'm one of the few conservatives that are involved with the Creative Coalition. It's trying to propagate the arts in schools and education, and a lot of things I believe in. It's a bipartisan thing, but when there is this strong partisanship... The other thing is, I'm pro-life, that's absolute, but I'm for live and let live. I'm an entertainer, I don't believe in stopping anyone's freedoms of lifestyle.

Throughout my time in Congress, I've made it my priority to work with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, to look past partisanship and to help pass commonsense legislation so we can help working families in Nevada and across our country.

Over the years, increasing partisanship has led many members of Congress reflexively to speak in favor of any military action launched by presidents of their own party while withholding support to presidents of the opposing party.

I'm very political. Because I read politics every day, so I'm familiar with the world. I approach the films is I'm trying to write what is true, so that supersedes partisan spin, in my opinion. I find partisanship is a thing for cable news and newspaper articles, but it's not interesting for art. I think we all believe what we believe, and I don't think a film is going to change someone's mind.

We need to recognize that, whether you're looking at Georgia or North Carolina or North Dakota or Florida, that the disenfranchisement of voters, the suppression of votes, cuts across every community, and therefore, it cuts across partisanship.

Look at countries like China, they are determined to dominate all clean technology areas, putting lots of money into wind, solar, electric vehicles and battery storage. America's political impotence, caused by their terrible partisanship, will see them left behind.

So we have a choice to make. We can once again let Washington's bad habits stand in the way of progress. Or we can pull together and say that in America, our destiny isn't written for us but by us. We can place good ideas ahead of old ideological battles, and a sense of purpose above the same narrow partisanship. We can act boldly to turn crisis into opportunity and, together, write the next great chapter in our history and meet the test of our time.

Maybe one thing that has happened is that the claims of non-partisanship of the mainstream media have been a little bit exploded. Mostly I'd say what, if anything has caused the change, are just the obvious technological changes - proliferation of easier access to getting your opinions out and the proliferation of media.

We've never thought too deeply about the roles things like forgetting or partisanship or inefficiency or ambiguity or hypocrisy play in our political or social life. It's been impossible to get rid of them, so we took them for granted, and we kind of thought, naively, that they're always the enemy.

In trying to explain our political paralysis, analysts cite President Obama's tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for important legislation. These are large factors to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit of all: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.

Politically speaking, Miami-Dade was once a Republican stronghold, thanks in large part to older Cuban voters who became more politically influential following the Bay of Pigs invasion. In contrast, Democrats used to rely on votes in North Florida and the Space Coast in an era of much softer partisanship.

For 18 months, leading up to the November election, I did everything in my power to show how ridiculous and crazy Trump's rhetoric was. I literally did a piece called "Donald Trump Is White ISIS." But, partisanship aside, there's a huge populace of people that were like, "I hear what you're saying, but I need something to change in my life, and I would like to have a representative that I think will do that for me."

Every issue of the paper presents an opportunity and a duty to say something courageous and true; to rise above the mediocre and conventional; to say something that will command the respect of the intelligent, the educated, the independent part of the community; to rise above fear of partisanship and fear of popular prejudice. I would rather have one article a day of this sort; and these ten or twenty lines might readily represent a whole day's hard work in the way of concentrated, intense thinking and revision, polish of style, weighing of words.

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience.

Sacrifice is a leader who puts the needs of millions of others before his own, who can forgo ego and pride in order to do what he promised he would. It's rising above pettiness and partisanship for the good of the country.

What is important to me is that I'm not accountable to and not controlled by party leadership. At the end of the day, I'm able to make my own decisions according to what's best for the community and the constituents I represent. It doesn't depend on what the partisanship is to the right or to the left.

New states were supposed to join the union when they reached a certain population, but in the late 19th century, population mattered a great deal less than partisanship.

My assessment is that we have a crisis in national political leadership. When will America recognize the danger we face? When will the corrosive partisanship of American politics end and allow for a bipartisan solution to arguably the most dangerous threat our nation has faced in over 60 years?

I want you to know that California is your sanctuary. We will always be a place where you can be whoever you are and become whoever you dream of being. California will always stand up for you. That's a principle that's bigger than partisanship, more powerful than any president.

Bipartisanship on behalf of an imprudent policy can be folly, just as partisanship on behalf of a just cause can be wise. What is clear is that politics will not stop at the water's edge simply because presidents plead for it. American foreign policy will return to the tradition of Truman and Vandenberg only when the American public demands it.

There is too much blind partisanship in Congress, which has blocked progress on critical issues. Too many members view compromise as weakness rather than the essence of our democracy. This has to end.

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.

Mr. Lincoln was generous by nature, and though his whole heart was in the war, he could not but respect the valor of those opposed to him. His soul was too great for the narrow, selfish views of partisanship. Brave by nature himself, he honored bravery in others, even his foes.

Look, I don't mind if the President sends a budget which he knows is not going to achieve anything. But when he prefaces his remarks as we just saw by saying we have to put politics aside, posing again as the one person in the country who rises above partisanship and party, speaks for the national interest, it's really grating.

A super-legislator body is not what the court was intended to be, When I ponder our country and its greatness, its weakness, its potential, my heart aches for less divisiveness, less polarization, less finger-pointing, less bitterness, less mindless partisanship.

The first thing I plan to do is what I did while serving in Arizona’s legislature — and that was to seek out members that I often disagreed with on important issues. It was through our authentic relationships and mutual respect that we found common ground on legislation that helped people. The challenge for Congress is to move past the harsh partisanship that we saw in the last term. This is a critical step in advancing policies that will strengthen and protect LGBT families.

The politics of partisanship and the resulting inaction and excuses have paralyzed decision-making, primarily at the federal level, and the big issues of the day are not being addressed, leaving our future in jeopardy.

Partisanship has gotten worse and worse.

In the campaign back in 2007, 2008, people would say, "Oh, he's being naïve. He thinks that there's no red states and blue states. And wait 'til he gets here." And I will confess that, I didn't fully appreciate the ways in which individual senators or members of Congress now are pushed to the extremes by their voter bases. I did not expect, particularly in the midst of crisis, just how severe that partisanship would be.

By pumping up hyper-partisanship, our country (America) is playing with forces that can easily get out of control. We are giving purpose and cover - and sometimes a sense of purpose - to the crazy among us. We are encouraging a culture of extremism

You know that Republicans will yell about the evils of partisanship whenever anyone tries to make a connection between the rhetoric of Beck, Limbaugh, etc. and the violence I fear we’re going to see in the months and years ahead. But violent acts are what happen when you create a climate of hate. And it’s long past time for the GOP’s leaders to take a stand against the hate-mongers.