Bob Beckel Quotes

I think President Obama is a committed, practicing nonideologue. He's consumed by neither tactics nor ideology. He is more concerned about outcomes than he is about process and categorizations.

[Ideological] Purity is fine but it doesn’t win elections and is not a governing strategy. Compromise is required.

The Tea Party people are ideologues. They are right, and no one can change their minds. There is no reason for compromise.

Terror … is often the result of giving politics a sacred, absolute dimension.

What matters most is finding practical, pragmatic solutions .... Ideological purity is for partisan extremists.

An ideologue believes that what is right will work. A pragmatist believes that what works is right.

I'm convinced that the most important division in human affairs is probably not the one between left and right, liberal and conservative. It's the one between zealotry and understanding, between absolute conviction and compromise, between preachers and politicians.

Be not too strict - too far east is west. You may lose all by demanding all.

That is what all of us must learn to do in the United States; to limit objectives, to get ourselves away from the absolute, to find out what is within our powers.

There are voices in the Republican Party today who preach pragmatism, who champion conciliation, who counsel compromise. I stand here today to reject those deceptions.

Too often ... in statecraft the object is to reach an agreement, which is only sometime—not always—the way to reach a result.

Any policy that is extreme we must avoid.

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

Most Americans reject an absolutist sense of religious or political truth.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

Republicans have the habit of giving their possible presidential candidates a saliva test for purity, and then bitching for 4 years because they lost the last election..

… the most disturbing aspect of the Republican political culture is how it puts its unquenchable thirst for power, domination and a radical ideology above facts, reason and the truth.

The insistence on a perfect cure often results in no betterment whatsoever.

Having principles is important, but you don’t want to walk off a cliff with your principles.

Extremes can be right on no side.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

I'm quite moderate.

I'm conservative on some things, and I'm not on others.

What I've found in being around political people is they're willing to negotiate their ideology somewhere around 5 percent. They believe that's really stepping out. And it's really hard to do business when you only move 5 percent from your ideology.

What I've learned is that life is a balance between idealism and realism.