Richard Rose Quotes

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

In our anxiety to get votes, we sometimes put in our platform things that are not orthodox.

The disagreement among American political parties, with only a few exceptions, has been over the practical question of how to secure the agreed objective, while conciliating different interests, rather than over ultimate values or over what interest is paramount.

It’s very hard for any one person to embrace every single aspect of any one party.

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

Party platforms are reasonable exercises but nobody pays much attention to them.

The last thing a political party gives up is its vocabulary. This is because, in party politics as in other matters, it is the party membership that dictates the language, and the membership relinquishes the ideas it has been given more readily than the words it has learned..

Scholars know that the processes of politics normally involve exaggeration, myth making and fierce animosities.

The noble aspirations, neat promises and slogans of a campaign get bent out of recognition or even break as you try to nail them down to the Procrustean bed of reality.

If hyperbolic political speech were outlawed, there’d be silence in America.

The Republican party is the party of nostalgia. It seeks to return America to a simpler, more innocent and moral past that never actually existed. The Democrats are utopians. They seek to create an America so fair and non-judgmental that life becomes an unbearable series of apologies. Together, the two parties function like giant down comforters, allowing a candidate to disappear into the enveloping softness, protecting them from exposure to the harsh weather of independent thought.

Do the rhetorical quarrels of bourgeois political parties have anything to do with the interests of the humble and downtrodden?

Political controversies are never entered into with any wish to gain knowledge, but only a triumph for the party.

There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between politicians of either major party.

There are some in Congress who would rather see their opponents lose than see their country win. That has got to stop…. They must find a way to put country ahead of party.

Liberals and the Democratic Party are demonic.

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.

I have learned, by some experience, that virtue and patriotism, vice and selfishness, are found in all parties, and that they differ less in their motives than in the policies they pursue.

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.

Democrats legislate; Republicans investigate.

If a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

We [Republicans] don’t need any new ideas.

This is the classic fight between the moderate Republicans who try to get to the middle by compromise and the conservative Republicans who try to create a new middle by driving the left away.

Our American elections have been fought between parties which, roughly, have represented the forces advocating change and those preferring stability.

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.