Thomas Jefferson Quotes

It's fine to talk about politics with people you agree with. But it is rude to argue about politics with people you disagree with. Political discourse becomes isolated, and isolated discourse becomes more extreme.

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

If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn't like me. So, why would I do that?

Nowhere are prejudices more mistaken for truth, passion for reason and invective for documentation than in politics.

Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.

Politics inflame the passions in a way that few beloveds can match.

It's not so much about the cause, it's about feeling superior to political opponents.

It is possible to work across the aisle in Washington, but it's hard. And I think it's been made worse by the kind of 24-hour news cycle, the fact that everything is on TV before you can work things out quietly. I think it's the intensity of information that makes it feel more difficult to get things done. But I didn't leave with a bitter taste about the politics. The one thing that I would say is, I do think there is an unfortunate tendency to turn political differences, or policy differences, into critiques of one another's character or motives, and that's unfortunate.

I just don't need cable news. There's nothing that happens on cable news that I don't already know. I'm talking about just the acquisition of information, learning things. What is on cable TV is not that. Cable news isn't news. What is happening on cable news right now is a political assassination of not just Donald Trump, but of ideas and cultural mores that I believe in.

My Grandmother wouldn't even speak the word Democrat if there were children in the room, she'd say Bastards instead.

It is impossible, maybe undesirable, to take partisanship out of the political process.

[The spirit of party] opens the door to foreign influence and corruption, which finds a facilitated access to the government itself through the channels of party passions.

If you delve into and a part of the political wars, the - as I would call it, the arguing ad infinitum. It never ends, and very few people I've noticed ever change their mind.

A lot of the Republican rhetoric better than the Democrats'. But when they're in office, it's pretty much the same thing. It's serving their supporters, it's corporate welfare, it's cronyism which is so destructive, particularly to the disadvantaged.

In America, we have a bifurcated country, we have a polarized country. One of the reasons I think it's polarized is because of identity politics on the left.

The genius of the Republicans has been how they figured out how to so polarize the middle class that we vote against our own best interests.

I am convinced that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. For it's precisely the pursuit of ideological purity, the rigid orthodoxy and the sheer predictability of our current political debate, that keeps us from finding new ways to meet the challenges we face.

Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half.

In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

Where would the Republican Party being without talk radio the last 25 years? And yet who now is enemy number one? Talk radio! I don't know what I did to Michael Gerson, but he's back again in the Washington Post blaming everything [Donald] Trump on me.

The whole notion of politics is they always present you with this or this or this. I’ll get a newspaper to read between the lines. Why do you have to adhere to prescribed formulas that they have and people argue over them and they’re all in a box. And you watch Fox claw CNN, and CNN claw Fox. Sometimes I catch a piece of the news and it seems insanity to me. I quietly support candidates. I’m not out there banging a drum for candidates. But I have supported a candidate and it’s a whole other world.

[Bush Hating] undermines the good faith necessary for democratic discussion. Which is a large part of what people like Al Franken are all about.

The Democrat Party is a shrinking and dwindling hate group. That's literally what they've become.

But there's a lot of them that had that exact reaction, who had never heard Trump speak before. And I remember when I said this after [Donald] Trump's speech, I had a lot of emails. "Come, Rush! It's not... People aren't that segregated anymore." Don't doubt me on this. The left, you do not know how they sequester themselves.

The problem with the immigration debate, it's probably is the most poisoned and political debate of any issue, because you have this huge voting bloc that everybody says is yours