David Gauke Quotes

I'm a moderate. I hang out in the middle. I vote against my party with some regularity and try to compromise. It doesn't appear right now that the Republican Party is welcoming moderates any more.

There are voices in the Republican Party today who preach pragmatism, who champion conciliation, who counsel compromise. I stand here today to reject those deceptions.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

I don't think that the Left has a monopoly on bad ideas. I don't think the Right has a monopoly on good ideas.

I know that there's pros and cons to everything.

We have drained common sense out of our politics. The more we focus on tactics and games, the more good people check out and give up.

Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when someone falls into one category for everything, I'm very suspicious. It doesn't make sense to me that you'd have the same solution to every issue.

It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always 'Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats.' That's been true for my entire lifetime.

I'm definitely a centrist and feel like both parties can be absurd.

One learns to itch where one can scratch.

My view on Democrats is that they're fascists disguised as liberals, or liberal moderates. You're not allowed to say anything they don't agree with. You're not allowed to do anything.

Dogmatic ideological parties tend to splinter the political and social fabric of a nation.

For those of us who consider ourselves political moderates, life is a dispiriting slog, a sorry mix of rectitude and ineptitude.

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

In all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging.

Polarized positions are an indulgence which … the nation cannot afford.

The vice of our leading parties ... is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying out of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.

The remedies are neither easy, nor cheap, nor immediately realizable.

President Bush should learn to focus on the shades of grey

You do not compromise with the right wing of the Republican party.

Avoid false choices driven by ideology.

My Republican compatriots do not feel that people ought to work with Democrats across the aisle—Compromise is a bad word.

You used to get legislation done by getting the moderates to agree. But we have no moderates now so it doesn’t get done

The people who show up at the early primaries are very passionate and not much interested in compromise.

The polarization of American politics is the proximate cause of the ongoing budget deficit…. Lately, the ideological center in Congress has thinned, and the distance between the parties has widened. Compromise has come to be seen as surrender—and the U. S. Government has all but come to a halt.