Jill Stein Quotes

Unless you are a prohibitive front-runner, an unanswered smear is believed.

It wouldn’t hurt to remind the voters of what scoundrels your opponents are and to smear them at every opportunity….

There was a slow-motion swift boating of Hillary Clinton in '15.

All it takes is Harry Reid saying a friend told him [Mitt] Romney hadn't paid his taxes in ten years and it's over. But these kinds of things aren't gonna work on [Donald] Trump.

The Republican I ran against, at the end of the campaign, had decided that I was "a friend of terrorists" and "a friend of pedophiles." That's the kind of crap they came out with. I expect that's the kind of crap they'll come out with again.

Wow. Ted Cruz falsely suggested Marco Rubio mocked the bible and was just forced to fire his communications director. More dirty tricks.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself. It's easy to point at me. I'm convenient.

Conservatives and companies condoned Rush Limbaugh's politics of personal destruction when it came to smearing elected officials. 'Fair game,' they said, even when crass and crude. That's just the way it is.

John McCain was victimized in the South Carolina primary.

Sure those quotations were irrelevant, but we had one objective: to keep him [Sinclair] from becoming Governor. But because he was a good man, we were sorry we had to do it that way.

I don't believe in mud slinging. I don't think it does any good.

If a negative ad is run against you and you don't answer it, it becomes the truth.

It’s attack advertising. It’s dirty tricks advertising. It’s dishonest and lowers the level of the political conversation.

If politicians throwing mud begin to slip in it, perhaps they will head for higher ground.

The tone of a portion of the press of the country toward public men, and especially toward political opponents, is degrading, all forms of coarse and noisy slander being apparently considered legitimate weapons to employ against men of the opposite party or faction.

I think the boy [Richard Nixon] should be attacked, but frontally, not obliquely.... Reference was made to lampoons and satires in times past. What we did not discuss was whether they were successful. Did Swift ever win an election? ... The more I think of it the less convinced I am that it is a good, meaning effectual, plan at all. We need direct attacks-- kidney punch zingers, like “Nixon plays both sides of the gutter” or “Part Boy Scout and part scorpion” … All of these are dirty, but as I said, the man who tries Queensberry against gutter fighting is going to get the hell kicked out of him.

Politicians have done some grim things in pursuit of the office. President Franklin Roosevelt was a philanderer; nevertheless, he pushed aides to use his opponent Wendell Wilkie's affairs to hurt him. He even tutored aides on how to spread rumors without getting caught.

When we were subjected to a vicious character assassination campaign orchestrated by senior White House officials and championed by their allies in the right-wing echo chamber, Hillary reached out to us. Her counsel during that tumultuous period was as timely as it was wise.

I'm not going to get down in the gutter with DeSantis and Trump - there's enough of that going on.

Here's the real thing. Democrats got to understand that the first line in the Republican playbook is going to be smear, you know? And there's nobody who's going to be able to avoid it.

We do know that [Hillary Clinton] was probably attacked and smeared as much as any candidate ever has been. We know that.

With 'swift-boating' now being used by the ignorant as a synonym for false charges, it's worth remembering that it was John Kerry who had to retract his statement about his secret Christmas mission to Cambodia, despite it having allegedly been 'seared, seared' into his memory.

Politics can be very mean and dirty. The things politicians say about each other, and what activists say, I had a brief glimpse of that for a couple of days. If I ever had any questions about whether I wanted to run for office, I now know the answer - I don't.