Rutherford B. Hayes Quotes

Well, I don't know too many governors who are flaming ideologues.

While their fiscal views aren't mine, the moderates are the last reasonable voice in the current Republican Party.

From the political angle, I'm trying to be apolitical if you will. I mean people say, 'Are you a red state or blue state?', I say, 'I'm purple.' I think there are great ideas on both sides of the aisle and neither side has cornered the market.

You can play golf with liberals, be neighbors with them, go out to dinner. I just don't want them in power.

The Democrats just don't have a foreign policy that they're willing to defend, that they're willing to use to take down the president's. We're dealing with the power of suggestion here.

When I arrived in the Senate, the moderate so-called Rockefeller Republicans held the balance of power.

There is much to dislike about President Obama's approach to the financial crisis. But opposition, it seems, will have to come from somewhere other than conservatism. The party out of power is also a party out of touch.

Major parties have lived more for patronage than principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power, to arrange sufficiently satisfactory compromises of interest to remain there.

Newt Gingrich developed a whole vocabulary of polarization in order to get Republican candidates elected.

Not every Democratic idea is a good one; not every Republican idea is a bad one.

Even with the approach that I take in Congress, which is to bring people together to get things done - many people describe that as 'reasonable' - I couldn't vote for John Boehner's re-elect.

People who truly represent an extreme on either side have a very difficult time getting bipartisan support for what they're doing.

When it comes to conservative social issues, it saddens me when sometimes my fellow Republicans duck and cover in the face of pressure from the left. Our loudest opponents on the left are never going to like us so let's quit trying to curry favor with them.

Those who are leftists, once in power, are not different from other parties.

I've always believed in challenging Republicans where they think they are strongest.

There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle.

What the 1990s taught the Clinton veterans was that you could 'triangulate' with a GOP-controlled Congress.

It is always a disappointment to turn from forthright consideration of some subject - whether from the Left or the Right, a poet or a plumber - to the Beltway version, in which the only aspects of the issue that matter are the effects it will have on the fortunes of the two parties and the various men in power.

I'm someone who believes in centrist governing philosophy.

Well it's really hard to satisfy the right wing. I can tell you that.

I don't look forward to a time when every politician, every legislator goes to Washington absolutely committed to an extreme point of view. Elected representatives are sent to Washington to compromise, not to never compromise.

Partisan rancour and party politics and ideology have got in the way of compromise - and compromise is the only thing that has ever made politics successful.

For decades Republicans have made policy with a higher purpose in mind: to solidify the GOP base or to damage the institutions and movements aligned with the other side.

I believe in operating in the big middle of the electorate and not being to the far right or the far left. I think you get so much more done.

It may be assumed as an axiom that Providence has never gifted any political party with all of political wisdom or blinded it with all of political folly.