Joseph Steffan Quotes

This is not politics. This is garbage. And we are disgusted by it. To those who are departed who sought in some, quote, clever, unquote way, to tarnish the reputation of Tom Foley, I say, good riddance.

Lee Atwater [Republican National Committee Chairman] saw politics as a cutthroat game and didn't mind holding the blade.

Well, I don't know too many governors who are flaming ideologues.

I don't regret setting bombs.

Negative politics have always been around.

It must be remembered that the Bush White House has a separate talent for character assassination that must not be confused with a talent for governance.

I believe that the far-right and the far-left can be equally insane - but there's no question that in the first years of the Obama administration, the far-right has been far crazier. In part, this comes from parties being out of power - without the responsibility of governing to ground them, the activists and the ideologues take over.

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

... political pornography.

In something as important as an election, a little name-calling sometimes breaks out.

American politics shows again and again that the best explanation is an accusation.

Because of the perverse, hostile, and malignant state of the opposition [the Federalists], with their faculty of imposing on the public mind and producing excitements, every measure originating with the executive will be attacked.

Vilifying members of other political parties is a puerile exercise.

I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the middle.

So long as we have government by party, the very notion of repose must be foreign to English politics. Agitation is, so to speak, endowed in this country. There is a standing machinery for producing it. There are rewards which can only be obtained by men who excite the public mind, and devise means of persuading one set of persons that they are deeply injured by another.

Rhe language of politics is experienced by most as spin with the assumption of dishonesty.

The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.

The bite of conscience is indecent.

Howard Dean is a cruel and extremist demagogue. And Howard Dean is as ignorant on John Ashcroft as he is on national security. If this cruel, loudmouth extremist is the cream of the Democrat crop, next November's going to make the 1984 election look like a squeaker.

So for those of you who haven't read any of my five best-selling books: Liberals are driven by Satan and lie constantly.

Guilt is a spiritual Rubicon.

Where there is no honour, there is no griefe.

A guilty conscience means at least you have one.

Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers.

Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.