Quotes about Moderates

Recep Tayyip Erdogan

There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that's it.

John F. Kennedy

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality

Kennedy said that he was quoting Dante. However, he or his speechwriter, got the quote wrong. In the Devine Comedy, Dante had a hot place in hell for the neutral, but the hottest place was reserved for traitors. Many people since then use this quote and attribute incorrectly to Dante because Kennedy’s version is the only one with which they have come in contact.

Wilfrid Laurier

I am branded in Quebec as a traitor to the French, and in Ontario as a traitor to the English. In Quebec I am branded as a Jingo, and in Ontario as a separatist. In Quebec I am attacked is an imperialists, and in Ontario as an anti-imperialist. I am neither. I am a Canadian.

Attacked by so many after years of service, he was finally defeated.

Martin Luther King Jr.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

David S. Reynolds

…moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. [American Civil War]

Lincoln Chafee

As a former Republican, I represent a group of Americans who all too often have no one to speak for them. This group doesn't necessarily have a name. We've been called 'moderates,' but that term can be misleading.

Thomas Friedman

The Middle East is a region where extremists go all the way and moderates just go away.

Steven E. Lobell

The main difference [in Israel] between the relative moderates and the relative radicals revolves around their disagreement over the relative importance of the State of Israel and the land of Israel.

The “radicals” refer to the extremely conservative, religiously-oriented Israelis. To them the only real and important element is the land that God gave to the Jewish people. They see the State as artificial and whose only legitimate role is to protect and defend the land of Israel. God has ordained the laws in the Talmud—the first 5 Books of the Old Testament. They do not believe in democracy but seek a Hebrew Theocracy of the Ancient Jews before they made the error of having kings. Some of them opposed the civil government of Israel when the country was founded via a UN resolution and a few would not even defend the new country under a civil government. The relative moderates see Israel as a nation state where the land of Israel can be changed, negotiated, traded as other nations do with their borders. One irony is no one knows exactly the borders of the land which God gave to the Jews and this is why archeology is so politically important in Israel compared to other countries.

Nicholas Kristof

Americans have called on moderates in Muslim countries to speak out against extremists, to stand up for the tolerance they say they believe in. We should all have the guts do the same at home.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

There are moderates in Israel. There are moderates in Iran, there are moderates in the Republican Party, moderates in the Democratic Party. What we need to do is we need link all of these moderates together and to figure out a way by which this particular coalition can speak to important issues to marginalize the voice of the extremists.

Peter Orszag

The middle in Congress is gone now. That is where we got most things done.

Mario Cuomo

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.

Vladimir Jabotinsky

Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions …. the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This position is a classical example of what some call a “hard line” negotiation stance. It argues that the enemy will never agree to anything that would be reasonable or acceptable to you UNTIL he has given up all hope of getting everything he wants. So this approach says there is no point in even discussing or negotiating anything until the military and economic and diplomatic situation is such that the other side has no hope of winning all it wants. In the case of the Arab Israeli dispute, for 50 years the Arabs believed that they would defeat the Israelis and push them out of the Middle East. For almost 50 years they would not even sit at the same table and negotiate anything. After starting and losing several wars, and falling further and further behind, the moderates began to be reasonable and hinted that they would accept Israel’s right to exist. However, there are some Israelis who argue as Jabotinsky did that there should be no discussions at this time until Hamas and all the terrorist groups have either given up or have been disarmed. This sort of hard line has rarely led to peace—especially if there are hard liners on both sides. They say never negotiate when you are weak. However if you are strong, there is no imperative to negotiate.

Daniel Pipes

If radical Islam is ever to be shunted aside it will be by other Moslems with alternate interpretations.

Robert Reich

Truth is not half way between right and wrong;

John Kasich

There are moderates in Syria who we should be supporting.

Washington Post

Attempting to achieve U. S. strategic ends through partnerships with Arab autocracies yields mixed results, at best, in the short term and is cancerous in the longer run….Middle Eastern dictators are neither moderates nor good allies.

John Ashcroft

There are two things you find in the middle of the road—a moderate and a dead skunk.

Compare this with the earlier left wing version of Jim Hightower.

Rached Ghannouchi

A stable democratic system cannot be established without the effective participation of the mainstream, moderate, Islamic movement.

This illustrates the major problem of establishing democracy in an Islamic nation. If the mainstream of Islamic people accept democracy as in Turkey, there can be a vibrant democracy. But if the mainstream sees all other religions as heresy and insists on a literal interpretation of the Koran, then democracy is impossible as in Saudi Arabia.

Edwin A. Walker

In patriotism, loyalty, and combat, there are no moderates.

Barry W. Lynn

There are too many political moderates in America.

Najib Razak

The vast majority of Malaysians are sensible people; they're moderates, they want peace, they want harmonious race relations at home. They look for national unity.

Steven J. Brams

A simple election reform to encourage moderates to run, and win, would be approval voting, in which voters can “approve of”—and thereby vote for—as many candidates as they like. The candidate with the most “approvals”—votes—wins the election. Because approval voting does not restrict voters to supporting only one candidate, it tends to result in the election of a centrist, not the strongest minority candidate who benefits from a divided field. Approval voting is widely used by major engineering and scientific societies to elect their officers. At NYU, the politics and economics departments use it to elect a chair. To implement approval voting in public elections, the parties could choose to use it in their primaries, or state legislatures could mandate its use. Bills to do this have been introduced in several states, including New Hampshire.

Nolan Matthew McCarty

… because … gerrymandering makes the districts less competitive, candidates are freed to pander to their bases while ignoring moderate and independent voters. More ever, politicians who do not pander face primary challenges from ideologically purer candidates.

Bill Maher

There is no such thing as a moderate Republican anymore.

Moderates Quotes