Paolo Bacigalupi Quotes

I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.

The issues of the day have never seemed more complicated, and yet the conversations over how to solve them increasingly resemble cars passing down a divided highway. Whizzing by without a glance.

There is no civil discourse left and it is really sad.

We really need to move to a bit of a post-partisan world where we actually start solving problems and stop kind of living in a country where the political leaders act like half the country is entirely wrong about everything they believe and increasingly try to pit American against American.

Any time the country is split 50/50, the leader is wrong.

I think one of the things that we are facing right now is that we've stopped listening to each other in our politics.

Unfortunately, the genuine relationships and friendships that some of us have developed across the aisle in recent years does not translate into a willingness to seek compromise, consensus, or middle ground on the major challenges facing our state. The extreme ideology of the self-styled Tea Party legislators in Arizona absolutely rules the day.

I think labels have been used alot during this election process to divide people, and at this point in time we really need people to come together, and be their own person, come with their own suggestions, and really solve the problems that we have facing this country.

The American people do not care which Party solves the problems confronting our nation.

What Republicans have done in my view is that they are systematically dismantling a sense of community in America.

We're getting the sort of 'compromise' American politics specializes in: the one where things are intentionally made worse for most people in the hopes that if things are made bad enough, the other side will cave.

When I talk to people outside the beltway, I don't think people are that divided.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership in the House right now seems to have been strangled by the tea party.

Society cannot share a common communication system so long as it is split into warring factions.

We can't allow ourselves to descend down the rabbit hole of unbridled partisanship for partisan sake.

When people get at each other's throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.

I think there's a lot of problems with being a two-party system.

Conflicts over the public-school curriculum are commonplace, clamorous and unproductive. The two sides talk (more frequently, shout) past each other. Protesters often suggest that anyone who disagrees must be un-Christian, immoral, racist or sexist.

I wasn’t elected to get into back room deals with Jesse Helms. I’ve despised Jesse Helms since I was 18 years old.

While Washington's establishment ... is whipped into motion by the mere whiff of an emotional issue or scandal, there is no reward in today's Capitol for fixing the broken mechanics of government or solving the huge problems that haunt us.

The people are fed up with politics and partisanship.

We have seen in Washington the worst kind of partisanship, the worst kind of gridlock. There is nothing wrong with our country. There is much wrong with our politics ….

I think we all realize too that there are some people in this Capital City whose task is in large part to stir up dissension, and to magnify normal healthy disagreements so that they appear to be irreconcilable conflicts.

We need less bipartisanship in Congress.

Where liberals see as an ever-more-splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel. Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.