Joseph Moakley Quotes

Incivility is not the disease. It is the symptom. Partisanship is the disease…. When your highest duty is to your party, the public interest becomes subservient.

I view the traditional two parties as in some ways very evil. They've become monsters that are out of control. The two parties don't have in mind what's best for Minnesota. The only things that are important to them are their own agendas and their pork. Government's become just a battle of power between the two parties.

The more you read and observe about this Politics thing, you got to admit that each party is worse than the other. The one that's out always looks the best.

I'm pretty happy not to be an insider anymore. There's just no common ground. I don't know if it's distrust or that the politics is substantially more partisan than the public. But there's no pressure to make a grand bargain on fiscal matters, on growth, on anything.

The more you observe politics, the more you've got to admit that each party is worse than the other.

Everywhere I go - from Main Street to Wall Street - people ask, 'What's happened to our political system? Why can't Washington folks work together?'

Our two-party system has served us well over the years, but never better than in those times of great challenge when we came together not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans united in a common cause.

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.

The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.

The worst excesses of the Congress of the 1980s pale in comparison with what is going on in Washington today.

There does seem to be in the U.S. now an ideology and an entrenchment that has stopped people doing what they are hired to do, which is govern rather than run for office the whole time.

Texans don't want to sit back and watch Austin turn into Washington, D.C. State leaders in power keep forcing people to opposite corners to prepare for a fight instead of coming together to get things done.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Today, I think the attitude is that governing is not necessarily good politics, and the result is that it's much more partisan and much more divided.

While Obama, the olive-branch poseur, has called for a restoration of 'civility' in Washington and liberal elites whine and whinny about the need for 'no labels,' class-warfare demagoguery has metastasized unchecked.

The reason that last-ditch political maneuvering has become business as usual in Washington is that the actors involved are drunk on blame and are convinced that the voting public is, too. They count on outrage, thereby spreading numbness. They cherish the prospect of partisan fury, thereby inspiring nonpartisan disgust.

There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great political parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other.

We are America. They [Democrats] are not America.

The Democrats fought with the conservatives. The Republicans fought with the liberals. The Bull Moosers fought with everybody.

The animosities of elections should have no place in our Government, for government must concern itself alone with the common weal.

Most Republicans who are registered Republicans are decent, honest good people who you have a difference of opinion with. The leadership of the Republican Party are a bunch of sociopathic maniacs who have their lips super-glued to the ass of the conservative right

A factious spirit prevails from one end of our country to the other. And by that spirit both Senators and Representatives are chosen. By that spirit the government acts; and, as to the provisions of the Constitution, however they may fill up the space of a speech to round off a period, or perfume a flower of rhetoric, they cannot restrain men heated in the chase of party game.

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.

We need less bipartisanship in Congress.

How can you hope to build up a nation by fragmenting its politics into opposing camps? Whatever one group builds, the other will endeavour to destroy..