Political Paralysis Quotes

Federal governments and even state governments within countries have basically been immobilized by conflicting interests, by conflicting views of what science is, and the inability to lead. They are immobilized because they don’t want to take tough votes and alienate half of the constituency.

Congress is almost totally dysfunctional right now. All we've done this year and my first year in the Senate ... is barely keep the doors open.

Political paralysis and partisanship are sabotaging American power.

I think a reason that a lot of people feel politically paralysed is that it used to be clear how power was organised. But those who have their hands on the levers of popular culture today have great power - and it isn't even clear who they are.

Despite the fact that the country was electing Republicans, Obama wasn't being stopped, and it's because of the political system. The political system has evolved into a giant bureaucracy, the primary purpose of which is self-preservation, not fixing anything.

Power is action; the electoral principle is discussion. No political action is possible when discussion is permanently established.

In Washington, you have imaginary problems, and they can't even solve the imaginary problems.

Government destitute of energy, will ever produce anarchy.

Parliamentary cretinism: that peculiar malady which since 1848 has raged all over the Continent, which holds those infected by it fast in an imaginary world and robs them of all sense, all memory, all understanding of the rude external world.

Washington has become a place where good ideas come to die.

The political system is broke. It doesn't matter who the leader is if you are frozen in time and your hands are tied. Social media is so strong that minority groups get a huge say.

Things go wrong in America.... What cowardice in government and Congress! They are afraid of conscription, of resolute financial steps, of attacks on slavery, of everything that is urgently necessary; they let everything loaf along as it will, and if the semblance of some measure finally gets through Congress, the honorable Lincoln so qualifies it that nothing at all is left of it any longer.

[Barack Obama] says that he thinks America felt better, more confident, because Washington was not simply in a gridlock, in stasis, where nothing was being done. And he talks about that as a positive.

Washington is a complete mess. It's become a venue for partisan bickering, where the needs of the working class just don't matter.

An opposition that won't oppose paralyses our political and democratic system.

Politicians are never going to turn this country around. Our country's a mess. The politicians are going to destroy this country. They're weak and they're ineffective.

The 113th Congress has spent much of the year doing nothing but collecting campaign contributions …

Congress seems to be very good at doing nothing.

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.

Congress is good at two things: Doing nothing and over-reacting.

Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.

Washington is paralyzed by extreme political rhetoric that creates powerful sound bites but poor policy.

I may be paralyzed from the waist down, but unlike Gray Davis, I'm not paralyzed from the neck up.

Westminster is gripped by a fanatical race towards a cliff-edge Brexit and nobody is stopping to think about the impact it would have on the everyday lives of the people we serve as politicians.