Political Shift Quotes

If you're not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative at 40, you have no brain.

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

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.

Never again should we Democrats wear the livery of the conservative.

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

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.

It was said that Chile was not ready to vote for a woman, it was traditionally a sexist country. In the end, the reverse happened: the fact of being a woman became a symbol of the process of cultural change the country was undergoing.

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.

I mean I look forward to the day when I can be Republican again.

The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.

In 1996, Bill Clinton declared the era of big government over in the State of the Union address.

I am sure future historians will say the biggest and most astonishing change in politics has been the embracing of all the tenets of Thatcherism by the party of Keir Hardie: trade union legislation, Europe, the replacement of Trident, 10 per cent tax for people who have made millions from their companies.

When I was sworn in, we had Republican-sponsored climate-change bills all over the place. You had John McCain running for President in 2008 on a strong climate platform. You could see American democracy actually starting to work at solving a difficult problem.

In short, Republicans under Trump have finally destroyed the New Deal, turning the government over to a small cadre of wealthy businessmen, unhampered, to run the country as they see fit.

Individuals move and shift from one party to another simply on their aspirations for office.

I've been intrigued by politics my whole life. And, yes, I am very close to the Clintons. I was a Hillary person until I was an Obama person. And she was a Hillary person, too, until she was an Obama one, evidently.

I was brought up as a Republican. But when I realized that at the end of the day there wasn't much difference between a Democrat and Republican, I became a libertarian.

When I was a sophomore at USC, I was a socialist, pretty much to the left. But not when I left the university. I quickly got wise. I'd read about what had happened to Russia in 1917 when the Communists took over.

The era of big government is over.

The revival of the Right is as extraordinary as it would be if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster; if we had reacted to Watergate by making Richard Nixon a national hero.

People ask me what I am politically and I've previously offered this equation: I became a conservative by being around liberals. And I became a libertarian after being around conservatives.

How did the party that elected the first black U.S. senator, the party that elected the first 20 African-American congressmen, how did that party become a party that now loses 95 percent of the black vote?

I believe that for the past twenty years there has been a creeping socialism spreading in the United States.

I was raised a Democrat, and now I'm an Independent.

Brexit has given us the start of a conversation with people who perhaps haven't traditionally voted Conservative.