John Adams Quotes

There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great political parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other.

Excessive partisanship is the problem. There has never been a democracy in the history of the world in a polity of any size where you didn't have political parties. Even sometimes over the objections of the people who started it.

The two parties are still more polarized than ever before and the rise of partisan media is an important reason for it.

Neither political party is clean when it comes to tactics that divide our people.

The Founders didn't mention political parties when they wrote the Constitution, and George Washington in essence warned us against them in his Farewell Address.

If a political party becomes a sectarian party, that is a problem…. Dividing the country along religious lines is just not worth any possible benefit.

Important issues do not always split along party lines.

Party divisions, whether on the whole operating for good or evil, are things inseparable from free government.

We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy.

We are fond of distinctions; we place ourselves in opposition, and quarrel under the denominations of faction and party, without any material subject of controversy.

…to make a commonwealth is to divide it into parties, which setteth them at perpetual variance, the one party endeavouring to preserve their eminence and inequality, and the other to attain their equality.

Because of our peculiar electoral law, the American government is divided between two parties. The American people are not.

I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.

Let me now warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party. The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms; kindles the animosity of one part against another. In governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

Were parties here divided merely by a greediness for office,...to take a part with either would be unworthy of a reasonable or moral man.

Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other. Not only individuals but states have thus a confirmed dyspepsia.

Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers.

I think that to the extent that we focus on problems where we can build a moral and a political consensus, then I think that we move the country forward and when we are divided and our politics is focused on dividing, then I think we're less successful, not just from the perspective of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party but from the perspective of the nation as a whole.

I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.

There are no moderate Republicans left, with the exception of a few who would vote with us when it doesn’t make any difference,” Frank said. “It’s the most rigid ideological party since before the Civil War. … The bumper sticker I’m going to have printed up for Democrats this year is, ‘We’re not perfect, but they’re nuts.’

Faction is to party what the superlative is to the positive. Party is a political evil, and faction is the worst of all parties.

I agree with George Washington's concern about parties: They become an end in themselves, rather than being committed to helping people improve their lives.

The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies. The Meanies want to take away your benefits, and the Weenies want to compromise with them.

There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.