Jeb Bush Quotes

I think what hinders the argument is when people are afraid of hurting the feelings of racists and people who are genuinely - some of them - out of their minds. They demand to see Obama's birth certificate. They claim that he wants to kill our grandparents with his health care. They want to be able to carry their guns into every public place. Why do we need to coddle these people?

I think a lot of people vote in fear. People like Donald Trump are good at casting this shadow of fear over people, making them believe if they don't vote for him then the terrorists are going to get them or whatever. All his ways are to scare people to vote for him. It's so sad.

There is no such thing as a convincing argument, although every man thinks he has one.

I think that Donald Trump picked on people's fears, their anxieties and he gave them somebody to blame, and some folks just really turned out for him for that.

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.

As I've gotten older, I've gotten more liberal, and my father is increasingly conservative. It's so shocking to me because I always thought we had the same politics. The day I realized we voted for different presidents, I practically fell out of my chair.

The Republican Party has become something that Ronald Reagan would not recognize.

Political campaigns are designedly made into emotional orgies which endeavor to distract attention from the real issues involved, and they actually paralyze what slight powers of cerebration man can normally muster.

I have been a professor, and I have been a policymaker, and as a professor, you think in terms of truth or absolutes.

In the age of Trump, we need to be aware of emotional rhetoric and its power regardless of whether or not it's based in fact.

I'm fascinated that people drawn to cults want to know what to do. And people want to know what to think. And people want to know how to feel. Not just what to feel but how to feel.

One of the things I noticed about the Trump supporters was a lot of projected fear. I can't tell you how many times a conversation went like this: "We've got to stop these immigrants, because it's terrible." I'd say, "Okay, what personally have you observed about this?" And there would be basically nothing in that box. And I'd say, "Where'd you get your information?" thinking they were going to say Fox. But they would always say, "Well, I get my information from all kinds of sources." Fox is kind of center-left to a lot of people now.

The impulse to scapegoat and belittle threatens to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking people. In the case of the Republican Party, those things also threaten to turn us into a fearful, backward-looking minority party.

When people look only at the surface and that satisfies them and they think from that surface they see, that is to be truly blind.

It is amazing how many people think that they can answer an argument by attributing bad motives to those who disagree with them. Using this kind of reasoning, you can believe or not believe anything about anything, without having to bother to deal with facts or logic.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

Conservatives are people who worship at the graves of dead radicals. Stop to think about that. The people who started this country, George Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, these were not conservatives; these were the radicals of the time. In fact, conservatives always look back on people who they despised and make them into heroes. If you were to listen to the religious right today, they would make you believe that Martin Luther King was one of their flock. In reality, they hated him and did everything they could to destroy him.

Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind.

How can you have a reasonable debate with people who are constantly changing the panic? They are moving the panic to a greater wave of hysteria?

I am always interested in affecting people in some way, making them think about particular areas of history that they have never thought about or that they may have thought about in one way and then changing their view.

I think that at the end of the day, when people understand the circumstances that led to the circumstances, they begin to sway their views.

People think if they voted for somebody, they should reflexively defend everything they do or say. And if you voted against somebody, you should just as reflexively oppose everything they do or say. It's not very helpful. What's more constructive for our kids is to go on a case-by-case basis, evaluating particular policies.

When people say things like "don't let this moment pass without acting on gun control," what they're really saying is our arguments are so unpersuasive that they can only succeed when people aren't thinking clearly.

People who consider themselves political, who follow political developments most rigorously, are often those who view the political process with the greatest lack of perspective.

Tradition - one of those words conservative people use as a shortcut to thinking.