John Kerry Quotes

I don't mind the debates, they're good for America, but we shouldn't be out there attacking each other all the time.

Even if America is unlikely to descend into another civil war, our present trajectory carries huge risks. Millennials may take charge of the country without much memory of a functional Congress, tolerant public discourse, or social circles that transcend our atomized subcultures. Today’s college students can scarcely recall a life free of internet trolls!

It's so easy to trigger everyone these days, especially if you mention President Donald Trump.

Getting a lot more Americans interested in politics is not the same as getting a lot more Americans knowledgeable about the workings of democracy or government. It has brought the worldview associated with sports-talk radio to politics; you’ve got a team and you want that team to win, and the other team is always the worst, and the refs are always unfairly treating your side. Heaven forbid you concede that the other team played a better game.

I think the political process has degenerated into name-calling and extremism, and I think that that's unfortunate.

President Obama is not polarizing, but the media sure is.

I think it is very difficult today to have a reasoned public discourse on any controversial subject. Certainly, election years present a complicating factor.

There is a lot of noise and conflict in our political discourse, which is fun to cover, but I'm convinced from my travels that people also thirst for more details as well as insight and context.

You often see in Washington those who disagree you described as stupid or evil. It's one of the most unfortunate trends of modern political discourse. Portraying opponents as too dumb to know the truth but smart enough and wanting people to suffer.

The level of discourse in this country is falling to a depth that cannot be sustained.

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

Negative politics have always been around.

The two parties are still more polarized than ever before and the rise of partisan media is an important reason for it.

Discourse has ended in America. It's all just shouting and ranting and demonization. Do you know how the rest of the world laughs at you guys? Have you got any idea? They're just rocking with laughter night and day.

I think America is going to have to think through whether it wants to uplift the political dialogue or advance an approach that divides and, frankly, can lead to violence.

A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

Vilifying members of other political parties is a puerile exercise.

Members of Congress don’t speak to their colleagues any more. They talk to the national audience.

We’ve had gerrymandering all along, so there is no proof that this is the cause of all this polarization…there are two other major factors that are much, much more prevalent than redistricting. One is the 24-hour a day, 7 days a week news media, where you only get noticed if you’re extreme. And the other is McCain-Feingold which pushed a great deal of money to the extremes.

In my opinion, the polarization of our politics has mostly been brought about by the massive infusion of money—mostly spent on negative advertising that create divisions among the population that watches television and the two parties.

The politicians are not the only people who are in their own silos. Many of our citizens only watch or listen to the news that they want to hear, and if there is anything else, they turn it off. We all need to listen to the people who are on the other side.

Some of the United States' enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we'd sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn't need to be this way - but national recovery won't come from Washington. It has to start with you.

We need to understand that in the end, if we're going to make a positive difference in the future, we can't have election cycles where one side, the middle and the right side, they talk trash.

If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn't like me. So, why would I do that?

Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.