Ayaan Hirsi Ali Quotes

When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

As for life within a Legislature,— who can tell how warped and bent and twisted, and accommodated to the exigencies of party struggle become the faculties of belief?

Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

A man of sound political instincts can no more subscribe to the doctrine of absolute independence of party on the one hand than to that of unquestioning party allegiance on the other…. If we had no party allegiance, our politics would become mere windy anarchy, and, under present conditions, our government could hardly continue at all. If we had no independence, we should always be running the risk of the most degraded kind of despotism,—the despotism of the party boss and the party machine.

All political parties, if they are to be successful, have to be broad churches.

If there is one good thing I can say about the Republicans, it is that they are generally better than Democrats at putting the interests of their party above the interests of any one of its members.

The Republican Party either corrupts its liberals or it expels them.

Iowa caucuses have been a graveyard for hawkish Democrats.

Conservatives don’t seem to criticize their own as much as liberals do. It’s not that they don’t do it. It’s that they don’t do it with the same zeal and enthusiasm.

I am doing my best to prevent the corporations and the Republican Party Machine making me the … candidate for the vice presidency in order to get rid of me here as governor.

Nobody who ever runs for President should be the leader of a party.

The President is hampered at every turn by the necessity of humoring his party.

Parliamentary representatives of the Communist Party shall not introduce or support reform measures.

If the Democratic Party is to win in November, it will have to fly with both its wings—the liberal and the conservative.

I knew that I would be expelled from the Party, but I had to make this film

The [Russian] Communist Party decided that policy. As a good communist, I have to go along.

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

One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one's personal integrity.

There are certain elections where policy matters more than others….Personality without a platform will not cut it.

In the field of actual politics, parties are a necessity and organization is essential. It is the duty of the citizen, therefore, to support the party that stands for right policies and to adhere closely to its official organization. Loyalty should be rewarded by positions within the gift of the party; and disloyalty should be looked upon as politician treason.

Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line

Believing as I do in political parties, I had rather that the party ... should, in its conferences, make a declaration than to assume a leadership or take an individual position on the question.

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..

The two old parties … fight only for office. Observe how utterly both parties in this respect lack program and new leadership.

Major parties have lived more for patronage than principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interest to remain there.