Jonathan Hickman Quotes

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The blind allegiance to party is killing us.

Politicians are trapped in their own views.

Politics has become a little like football. We cheer for our favorite team no matter how well they are playing.

What has happened is we've allowed the people who run policies in this country to sort of make us pick Left and the Right as if those are the only two choices.

The Tea Party people are ideologues. They are right, and no one can change their minds. There is no reason for compromise.

When the Tea Party comes to town, compromise goes out the door.

Whether you are liberal or conservative, people seem to know the talking points for whatever the issue of the day is. Very rarely does it seem like these are opinions that people are coming up with themselves; it's like they watched the right cable news channel, and now they know what they are supposed to think, and they repeat that.

We must stop the Tea Party before the United States Senate falls into the hands of extremists and ideologues who leave no room for reason or compromise, who don't recognize common ground even when they're standing on it.

It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always 'Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats.' That's been true for my entire lifetime.

Basically, whenever someone says they're wrong, conservatives too often fall back on claims that those who disagree with them are biased and thus worthy of being ignored, a convenient position that allows them to avoid debating uncomfortable criticisms.

Our society has lost its taste for complexity and nuance…. We want simple answers …. We have almost disabled our politicians from speaking.

All political movements are like this — we are in the right, everyone else is in the wrong. The people on our own side who disagree with us are heretics, and they start becoming enemies. With it comes an absolute conviction of your own moral superiority. There's oversimplification in everything, and a terror of flexibility.

You used to get legislation done by getting the moderates to agree. But we have no moderates now so it doesn’t get done

Partisanship is culture. Loyalty to the team takes precedence over loyalty to the truth.

… the politically engaged will tend also to be the most closed-minded.

I tend to personally judge issue by issue rather than sort of endorsing this football-team mentality that we fall into in this country, where it's all about the team.

The fact is that Democrats cannot stand dissent.

The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises Republicans.

He knows very little of mankind who expects, by any facts or reasoning, to convince a determined party man.

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

To be locked into partisan politics doesn't permit you to think clearly.

Extremism is so easy. You've got your position, and that's it. It doesn't take much thought. And when you go far enough to the right you meet the same idiots coming around from the left.

The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences.

Progressives and conservatives alike lean, unconsciously, towards particular conclusions, and then scrabble around to rationalise those conclusions to themselves.