Michael Bennet Quotes

It is an essential tenet of our whole representative form of government, the idea that there should not be some tyranny which makes it so nobody can even have a chance to vote.

Your political system is actually too democratic. The fact that Americans vote on every bill and proposition can prolong bigotry indefinitely, especially where it is aimed at minority groups.

Obama hasn't been divisive just because his policies are so unpopular, though that's a large part of it.

Few believe Democrats will control both houses of Congress in 2021, and even if they manage to, Republicans will still be around to play spoiler on plenty of big agenda items.

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped.

We've changed in the sense that we flipped - and this is no longer the Republican party of Lincoln. This is the party of suppression.

Democratic forms of government are vulnerable to mass prejudice, the so-called tyranny of the majority.

The American political system is so porous, it's so open, it's so frustrating for those who are trying to make policy.

President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the Tea Party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.

It's insanity for a party that believes in freedom to allow some Republicans to seize an agenda that is totally alien to the agenda that was established in the election.

As a senator from the only true swing district in the Texas Senate, I've been targeted by the GOP for my outspoken criticism of their extremist attacks on public education and voting rights, to name just two examples.

I've never seen Washington as divided as we are right now.

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party

In every free and deliberating society, there must, from the nature of man, be opposite parties, and violent dissentions and discords; and one of these, for the most part, must prevail over the other for a longer or shorter time.

A radical ... and revolutionary ... attack upon the fundamental basic principle of representative democracy for free people.

Washington DC has become an evidence-free zone.

American politics shows again and again that the best explanation is an accusation.

It appears that there have been differences of opinion and party differences, from the first establishment of government to the present day, and on the same question which now divides our own country; that these will continue through all future time; that every one takes his side in favor of the many, or of the few, according to his constitution

In the United States, where the numerical majority have long been in full possession of collective despotism, they would probably be as unwilling to part with it as a single despot or an aristocracy.

Too many people in this town think about politics when they make every decision.

The most dangerous diseases with which a free country can be infested, are two fashions, each strong in numbers, if their heats and animosities are come to such a height, that any side, in the struggle for power, is willing to give up liberty, rather than their irregular appetites should be disappointed. Where this happens to be the case, the condition of the public is indeed very desperate, inasmuch as liberty cannot subsist, unless where it has a great many more friends than enemies, because they who attack, supply by craft and diligence what they want in other strengths.

The tone is toxic here in Washington and we are exporting it around the country.

I have never seen American politics so divisive…. We can’t have Congressman not voting for things America needs because it is not popular in their district. We have to put America first.

The experience of the past one hundred and fifty years has revealed the danger that, through judicial interpretation, the constitutional device for the protection of minorities from oppressive majority action, may be made the means by which the majority is subject to the tyranny of the minority.