Ted Kennedy Quotes

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong.

Any time you've got both the Pope and the Dixie Chicks against you, you're not long for the White House.

The Republicans find their faith imperiled by Barney Frank's marriage. There is always a shadow on the wall, a monster in the closet, a mysterious rustling in the teeming underbrush of the conservative Id.

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

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.

All participants in politics want to impose as much of their morality on others as possible.

In this country there are two parties: the righteous and the fallacious

When, in a democratic society, policies don’t go their way, people tend to blame it on a small group of other people who they believe have more influence.

Public opinion can become polarized into a bimodal distribution with only a few people in the center and many more lying toward the extremes. But under such circumstances, democracy will probably break down …

When an opinion has taken root in a democracy and established itself in the minds of the majority, it afterward persists by itself, needing no effort to maintain it since no one attacks it. Those who at first rejected it as false come in the end to adopt it as accepted, and even those who still at the bottom of their hearts oppose it, keep their views to themselves, taking great care to avoid a dangerous and futile contest.

Democracy does not seem to render the world more peaceful. The masses are emotional by nature, skilled propaganda will always succeed in arousing their feelings.

Some people believe giving more people a voice is driving division rather than bringing us together. More people across the spectrum believe that achieving the political outcomes they think matter is more important than every person having a voice.

The Freedom Caucus represents a pessimistic, divisive, and gerrymandered view of our nation. If America is to make progress, we must step forward from this form of politics - not just because we disagree with this or that policy but because it is fundamentally undemocratic and tyrannical.

Western enthusiasm for democracy stops when those opposed to its policies are elected to office.

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.

Both Left and Right take pleasure in mildly persecuting those who fail to meet their civic ideals.

The fact is that Democrats cannot stand dissent.

We need to understand that we've divided our country in language based states. So what happens is that more regional parties come in the front and different opinions don't let any one particular strong decision to pass through.

Our role as artist is more controversial now because there are those, claiming the absolute authority of religion, who detest much of our work as much as they detest most of our politics. Instead of rationally debating subjects like abortion or gay rights, they condemn as immoral those who favor choice and tolerance. They disown their own dark side and magnify everyone else's until, at the extreme, doctors are murdered in the name of protecting life. I wonder, who is this God they invoke, who is so petty and mean? Is God really against gun control and food stamps for poor children?

This is the age of the new tolerance and it is producing a bumper crop of anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment.

On one side you have book burners, Congressional wives and Pat Robertson. On the other side, you have vulgar comedians, foul-mouthed rap groups and Dennis Hopper—all your choices should be so easy.

The suggestion that liberals aren't moralizers is so preposterous it makes it hard for me to take any of them seriously when they wax indignant about "moralizers." Almost every day, they tell us what is moral or immoral to think and to say about race, taxes, abortion - you name it. They explain it would be immoral for me to spend more of my own money on my own children when that money could be spent by government on other people's children. In short, they think moralizing is fine. They just want to have a monopoly on the franchise.

A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence.

Liberals can always be trusted to see God in Mumia Abu-Jamal and the devil in the Pope.

This leads to a question - if a great many people are for a certain project, is it necessarily right? If the vast majority is for it, is it even more certainly right? This, to be sure, is one of the tricky points of democracy. The minority often turns out to be right, and though one believes in the efficacy of the democratic process, one has also to recognize that the demand of the many for a particular project at a particular time may mean only disaster.