F. R. MacKinnon Quotes

If you ask me to compromise on principle, I will get out the veto pen.

My prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot; for I owe my conscience to no mortal man.

You can’t set aside … values in the name of political expediency.

I cannot sacrifice or compromise my principles.

People whose views are swung when you get into these ridiculous debates - I think they're all nonsense. You've got to have a fundamental belief, you've got to believe in what you believe in.

I cannot surrender my principles, though the whole world besides should vote them down - I can make no compromise between truth and error, even though my life be the alternative.

I've never hidden my faith, but there are only a couple of issues I would die for. There are a few others I would dig my heels in on, and I've told my caucus that what they see is what they get.

My father ran for Congress in 2004, and I got a sense that there is no way to achieve much success without a certain amount of compromise.

Nobody has ever expected me to be President. In my poor, lean, lank face, nobody has ever seen that any cabbages were sprouting out. These are disadvantages all, taken together, that the Republicans labor under. We have to fight this battle upon principal and upon principal, alone.

This mode of electioneering suited neither my taste nor my principles. I though it equally unsuitable to my personal character and to the station in which I am placed.

Review" is a great word in politics. It will last you almost an entire election cycle if you play it right.

Spend most of your time with the people who are against you. Your friends are going to vote for you anyhow.

Elections are about fucking your enemies. Winning is about fucking your friends.

It's the economy, stupid!

Politicians trim and tack in their quest for power, but they do so in order to get the wind of votes in their sails.

In politics you win by division.

If you would know the depth of meanness of human nature, you have got to be a prime minister running for a general election.

Campaigns are not, and should not be, democratic processes. Otherwise nothing would ever get done.

You don't compromise principles, but you harmonize tactics to preserve unity.

Our differences are policies, our agreements principles.

Whoever has a principle, must go with it to the extreme, not hold by a middle.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

In politics, you have a one-day sale. You have every customer allowed in the store for one or two minutes on that day, and you have to sell a majority or plurality of the market or you are out of business.

We'd all like to vote for the best man but he's never a candidate.

Beholden to nobody Wilson had risen to his position through brainpower, wedding the complexity of his intellect with the simplicity of his faith, placing principles before politics, he followed his conscience, never first checking public opinion