James Hillhouse Quotes

I do not support the third party movement anymore. I now advocate the abolishment of all political parties. We've allowed the parties to take over the government.

The way to help this country is to limit Republican power.

Nearly from the founding we have had a democracy organized by two parties with wide wingspans, It’s often confusing to people why folks of different ideologies, different economic classes, racial and ethnic communities join under a particular political party.

To abolish all distinctions of party may not be practicable, perhaps not desirable, in a free government

I think one of the biggest curses in the U.S. is that we have only two political parties.

Unified party control of the organs of government has proved no panacea.

I will not be a Democrat or a Republican. They are the problem, not the solution. We need to abolish political parties in this country.

The founders were very worried that if parties developed in America, you might have something like the modern Italian system, where you have 20 different parties that divide Congress and the country and can't govern.

Incivility is not the disease. It is the symptom. Partisanship is the disease…. When your highest duty is to your party, the public interest becomes subservient.

If a political party becomes a sectarian party, that is a problem…. Dividing the country along religious lines is just not worth any possible benefit.

There aren’t any independents anymore.

There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great political parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other.

There cannot be a greater Judgment befall a Country than such a dreadful Spirit of Division as rends a Government into two distinct People, and makes them greater Strangers and more adverse to one another, than if they were actually two different Nations.

There can be but two great political parties in this country.

The mission of parties is to keep the people divided into factions, that they may be unable to do anything for themselves.

I have been amazed to see how unrealistic are the bases for political opinion in general. Only rarely have I found a person who has chosen any particular political party—democratic or totalitarian—through study and comparison of principles.

Bind down our politicians with the chains of our Constitution.

I’m against parties. Take the party designations from the ballot and make politicians run on their names only.

It is the necessary nature of a political party in this country to avoid, as long as it can be avoided, the consideration of any question which involves a great change.

My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society.

Maybe the critics are right. Maybe there's no escaping our great political divide, an endless clash of armies, and any attempts to alter the rules of engagement are futile. Or maybe the trivialization of politics has reached a point of no return, so that most people see it as just one more diversion, a sport, with politicians our paunch-bellied gladiators and those who bother to pay attention just fans on the sidelines: We paint our faces red or blue and cheer our side and boo their side, and if it takes a late hit or cheap shot to beat the other team, so be it, for winning is all that matters. But I don't think so.

Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amok by hamstringing it.

… the two factions (of the Republican Party) are at daggers drawn over government’s role, which one side sees as indispensable, the other as insidious..

You cannot govern the United States from one house of the Congress.

I was raised a Republican but I don’t recognize a once proud party that has been hijacked by extremists who are driving it off the flat earth that they pretend we are living on.