Compromise Politics Quotes

The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.

On the Sandy bill, I did the best I could on waste, fraud and abuse, and then when the final bill comes, you don't say, 'Hell, no' because you didn't get everything you want in there.

My wife and I are both Libertarian; she was a Democrat and I was a Republican, and we both met in the middle somewhere.

Government is the art of the momentarily feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.

Practical politics, being commonly an affair of compromise and relative truth,—a human attempt to modify the severity of Nature's processes …

The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. Because the alternative seemed to be revolution.

The fact that Obama is getting criticism from the left and the right might reflect his understanding of the underlying political dynamics.

All legislation of any consequence is a compromise. You have to recognize that.

You have a Republican House, close numbers in the Senate, a Democratic president. If we're going to move forward at all as a country, we're going to have to do it by standing together.

Any time a party has lost three consecutive elections, it becomes a bit more willing to explore the notion of principled compromise so it's able to pursue some of its objectives.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

If you really want to get something done in Washington, it has to be done in a bi-Partisan way.

Germany must be a country which generates political ideas and leadership, which is capable of compromise, which is sovereign and yet knows that it needs its partners on both sides of the Atlantic.

The way you have bipartisan negotiations, you sit down across the table, as we did with Ted Kennedy, as I've done with many other members, and you say, 'OK, here's what I want, here's what you want. We'll adhere to your principles, but we'll make concessions.'

In Congress we face the possibility of radical cuts based on nothing save grand compromises over what parochial interests need to be satisfied.

The U.S. has the power to block all anti-Israel moves in the Security Council, not just some of them, and to do so without agreeing to unfair, damaging compromises.

One of the really positive things about minority government is that there is the necessity to broker policy positions. What happens is you get a hybrid of what a single party might do. And I don't think that is a bad thing.

A wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along?

Most of my time as a legislator, I served in the minority. So I'm used to getting the heel of a loaf of bread.

Compromise disappoints those who buy into the most ambitious and simplistic populist slogans.