Phil Robertson Quotes

For all its faults, it is partisanship - based on core principles- that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders.

It's true that if you advise politicians on economic policy in the U.S. today, you spend your time in a cross between inquiry and combat. You are always on the periphery of harsh partisan warfare that has nothing to do with substance.

A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.

People are fed up with the politics where candidates just rip each other apart and then the voters lose in the end because no one really knows what anybody stands for.

Washington has, with some justification, gained a reputation for being hopelessly mired in partisan gridlock.

Liberals are some of the most arrogant, condescending smart alecks, but they're just pure ignorant, and they fit the bill of people who have no love and no respect for the founding of this country.

If right and left are competing to be the biggest victim, who is competing to be the government?

The issues of the day have never seemed more complicated, and yet the conversations over how to solve them increasingly resemble cars passing down a divided highway. Whizzing by without a glance.

There's a tendency in politics to attribute bad motivation much too quickly, and the sooner you attribute bad motivation to someone you disagree with, the harder it is to find some common ground to make some progress that would give people confidence that you got it more right than wrong.

These days everything is discussed in terms of political partisan perspective including the weather—especially the weather.

The media increase the political nastiness while distancing voters from those clashes. Citizens become spectators. ­Headline-­driven news emphasizes the extremes, the fights, the hysteria, the sensational. Political reporters, trying to appear objective by quoting two opposing sides to almost every story, mostly sharpen the differences, slighting any centrist position.

I don't want to engage in politics; it's too hot.

All I do is convert liberals to conservatism. That's what I do, and that's why they don't like me.

True, the country is divided, but it's not Right and Left. It's Left and Not Left. It is because, for liberals, politics is personal and therefore extremely loud. For the rest of us, we prefer community over calamity.

I don't like the whole 'slander, slander' conversation that most political debates are these days. So I tend to keep my political standpoint not to myself, but just relatively private.

Leftists are fighting back against Trump not with policy differentials, but rather with insane rhetoric and temper tantrums.

I haven't done things publicly to hurt conservatives.

On Twitter, people like me regularly get called "sore losers" by Trumpeters. It just makes me roll my eyes. This is not about winning and losing. We all lost, even them, they just don't know it yet.

We are more polarized. And some of that comes from the people and some of that comes from the media.

It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.

In the last war, people became vocal from the right-wing point of view: if you're liberal, then you're a traitor.

The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.

We cannot meet 'em [Democrates] halfway. We can't cross the aisle. These people, I'm talking about the left wherever you find them, the Democrats, they have to be defeated.

I do believe that the Barack Obama administration has reached a new low by using the instruments of the state against its political adversaries. Obama does not see people who disagree with him as well-meaning opponents but rather as enemies. That's not something that Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton did as President. Probably Obama's direct descendant in this line is Richard Nixon. And Obama seems to have carried Nixonian tactics to a new low. So, we've turned a corner in American politics that doesn't bode well for our future.

The part of the strangeness of coming back from the war is the way we talk about it. We try to have a discussion about the war that doesn't turn into a discussion about one political side or the other. I wanted to reach out and talk to people about it through fiction, the way a narrative can draw someone in and ask them those questions.