Negative Politics Quotes

Entering politics is a fate worse than death.

Not all negativity is bad. In politics, it's a necessary clarifying tool.

I just don't believe that being conservative means all you do is throw stones and poke people in the eye.

Nobody likes, you know, the ugly parts of politics.

Political rivalry is one thing but personal smear campaigns scrape the barrel of political infighting.

Backbiting and second guessing are endemic to losing campaigns.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

Negative campaigning is wrong.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad name.

I don't fancy myself a political commentator. I hate politics. I hate it.

Vilifying members of other political parties is a puerile exercise.

I guess I don't like the people in politics very much, to be blunt.

I don't like politicians, and I don't like politics. I definitely don't want to be associated with any of them.

We're in a political environment of competing pessimisms today.

[Referring to the Democrats:] They can't get elected unless things get worse, and things won't get worse unless they get elected.

It's very personal in its politics, very bitter and very negative.

I liked it when we had ugly politicians who droned on about issues.

Our nation stands at a fork in the political road. In one direction lies a land of slander and scare; the land of sly innuendo, the poison pen, the anonymous phone call and hustling, pushing, shoving; the land of smash and grab and anything to win. This is Nixonland. America is something different.

[Ed Miliband]'s elevated personal abuse into a sort of strategy

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

We've come to be consumed by a 24-hour, slash-and-burn, negative ad, bickering, small-minded politics that doesn't move us forward. Sometimes one side is up and the other side is down. But there's no sense that they are coming together in a common-sense, practical, nonideological way to solve the problems that we face.

Everybody in this race is against Obama, okay? So saying you're against Obama, against Obamacare, all the rest, it's all fine, well and good, except it doesn't move you forward.

Anyone who thinks that negative campaigning is a modern invention has never read the nineteenth century press

I'm afraid that's in the nature of modern politics - it's as much conducted by abuse as argument.

[On the Democratic Party:] Its leaders are always troubadors of trouble; crooners of catastrophe ... A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him.