Political Evolution Quotes

I'm not politically motivated. I used to be - passionately. I used to be very Left wing. Then I went very Right wing, and now I rest somewhere in the middle.

I was a Democrat for a period of time early on. And then I was also an independent. And then I became a Republican.

I grew up as a Democrat in a very strong Democratic family, but I will tell you that the Democratic Party that exists in this country is not the Democratic Party I grew up around.

Mao Zedong Thought was not created by Comrade Mao alone - other revolutionaries of the older generation played a part in forming and developing it - but primarily it embodies Comrade Mao's thinking. Nevertheless, victory made him less prudent, so that in his later years some unsound features and unsound ideas, chiefly "Left" ones, began to emerge. In quite a number of instances he went counter to his own ideas, counter to the fine and correct propositions he had previously put forward, and counter to the style of work he himself had advocated.

I'm a Progressive. Much in the same way our founding fathers - who, oddly enough, wouldn't get elected today - were Progressives.

Every generation of Americans writes its own Constitution.

Until 1847 Switzerland remained a pure Confederation of States, that is to say, she took five and a half centuries to make the step which the United States achieved at once.

I've been telling people, if we want to keep the Republican party in Texas, the Republican party in Texas needs to start looking like Texas. And I think that this is - that goes for the rest of the country as well.

We have exchanged the Washingtonian dignity for the Jeffersonian simplicity, which was in truth only another name for the Jacksonian vulgarity.

The democrat is a young conservative; the conservative is an old democrat. The aristocrat is the democrat ripe and gone to seed.

Economic developments made modern democracy possible.

Today's Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

In politics the future is never a straight line projection of the present.

Half a century ago, Ronald Reagan, the man whose relentless optimism inspired me to enter politics, famously said that he didn't leave the Democratic Party; the party left him. I can certainly relate. I didn't leave the Republican Party; it left me.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

We are a representative democracy. But how did we get there? We got there through direct action. And that's enshrined in our Constitution and in our values.

I think we've seen at least the beginnings of rather significant social and economic change in the Muslim world, which I think will in due course lead to more political change.

The Republican Party started with Lincoln as the party of civil rights. And the Democrats started with Jefferson as the party that did not believe in big government. If Lincoln and Jefferson came back now, they wouldn't know which party to vote for. Jefferson might start another revolution; Lincoln might secede.

Massachusetts we look at as the home of liberal democracy. In the 16th century, it was the home of repressive theology.

Once confined to a handful of wealthy countries, it [democracy] became, in a short period of time, the most popular political system in the world. In 1900, only 10 countries were democracies. By mid-century, the number had increased to 30…. By 2005 fully 119 of the world’s 190 countries had become democracies.

I couldn't help but be struck that this guy I had thought was the embodiment of everything wrong with American politics, a lot of his domestic policy was mind-numbingly, head-spinningly to the left of Obama's. It was under Nixon that the EPA was created. It was under Nixon that OSHA was created. Under Nixon that the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts were passed.

One step forward, two steps back ... It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties.

It's hard to say what the Founding Fathers would think of the modern presidency.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.