Party Line, Party Purity Quotes

I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.

Even a Dead Fish Can Go with the Flow.”

The rank and file were once again tasting the joy of being accepted by all groups. The party line made it possible during this period for ordinary members to be merely human beings and to act naturally, for their neighbors were now less frightened, and even listened to Communists explain that they were on the side of the American people.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the '50s. I apologized for following the party line so slavishly, for not seeing that Stalin was a supremely cruel misleader.

I don't necessarily vote a straight ticket in my own state because there are sometimes Democrats out there who are better than Republicans. It's hard to believe but it's true.

Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.

Enemy of the People

Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors' phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away.

Sometimes party loyalty asks too much.

Occupancy of the Front Bench imposes penalties as well as privileges. Its members have to surrender some of the freedom which the back benches afford, and they have to consider much more closely whether what they do and say may help or compromise the position of the Party.. These obligations are so trying at times that men … do not care to assume them, preferring the greater freedom of the back benches. I would not personally press anyone to change back bench freedom for Front Bench reticence and circumspection, but I should like you to consider whether or not you cared to do so. If you thought that you could stand the yoke (and I have not found it too difficult) it would be a pleasure to me to tell the members of the Party that I proposed to ask you to join those who sit on the Front Bench.

Black identity since the '60s has been a totalitarian identity. It's enforced. And if you don't subscribe to the party line, then you are a betrayer and a dissident, and you are treated as dissidents were treated in the Soviet Union.

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.

You have to understand that Republicans are on lockstep on one issue. They will not raise taxes. Democrats are in lockstep on another issue, pro-choice in all cases on abortion.

My books were attacked constantly by the Communist Party for not hewing to the Party line. I have never hewed to a Party line of any kind.

Many people vote a straight party line from the president down to city council. Hollywood publicists need to think long and hard about who they are putting forward to lead their awards season campaigns.

My message to women is it's okay not to toe the party line on every issue. You don't have to be a puppet or a mouthpiece for your party on every issue. You can be an independent thinker; you can take it issue by issue, and that's okay. You shouldn't be told, 'You can't sit with us.'

When you repeat, in that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others, that we're 'well-placed to weather the storm', I have to tell you that you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.

I think the speaker of the House in Congress should be like the Massachusetts speaker: all-powerful. He should appoint committee chairmen and remove them if they stray from the party line. He should be answerable only to the caucus, which can remove him at any time. I'd throw the seniority system out on its ear in Congress.

I would have been a disaster as a career politician. I would never have toed a party line.

I have never voted a party line. I vote on the individual and the issues.

Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don't seem to see this.

All modern political parties and all modern party ideologies originated as a reaction on the part of special group interests fighting for a privileged status against liberalism.

Mere analysis, that is the Party line, was … substituted for the raw, emergent movement of life itself. The psychology of human beings was descended not directly from experience but from a set of political theories.

The House of Representatives was not designed to sit idly by and rubberstamp every piece of legislation sent their way by the Senate, especially legislation passed on a straight party line vote under the spurious policy of reconciliation.

Peasants, who after the liberation of the country became the masters of their lands and their country under the benevolence of Comrade Kim Il Sung, launched the campaigns for increasing agricultural production and donating cereals out of patriotism, and thus faithfully supported the Party's line of nation building.