Inter-Party Conflict Quotes

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.

Our citizens never hesitate to take sides against one another, whether it's Democrats versus Republicans, Coke drinkers opposed to Pepsi enthusiasts or Yankee loyalists against Red Sox aficionados.

While countless Americans are pulling together to lend a helping hand, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pointing fingers in a shameless effort to tear us apart.

Vice presidents are at times tasked with issuing direct broadsides against enemies while the top guy stays above the fray. But never before has a vice president served as an attack dog against his own party's voters.

The passion which all Democrats seem to have for writing in Republican papers, and vice versa, is something astonishing, and it is only exceeded by their unconquerable desire to censure men of their own party.

It's a sad day when Republicans will attack fellow Republicans on an issue as fundamental as free enterprise.

Vilifying members of other political parties is a puerile exercise.

As an American, I condemn a Republican "Fascist" just as much as I condemn a Democrat "Communist." I condemn a Democrat "Fascist" just as much as I condemn a Republican "Communist." They are equally dangerous to you and me and to our country. As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.

I sent my flowers across the hall to Mrs Nixon but her husband remembered what a Democrat I am and sent them back.

The Labour Party has become consumed by collective bile towards... the Liberal Democrats. That portrays a rather nasty arrogance.

I've tried to maintain my independence in Congress. Sometimes that has meant opposing my own party leaders.

I would prefer that in the Republican party, we not engage in trying to destroy each other, because all that does is hand the election over to the Democrats. I don't know why there is this penchant for snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory, they'll find some way to destroy themselves. And it is just maddening to see it happening.

Concerned about re-election, interest-group reactions, the media, or fundraising, many legislators have found it in their interest to refuse to cooperate with members of the opposing party - or to treat them as enemies in some kind of war, in which the whole point is to defeat and humiliate them. But the American people have been the real losers.

My father was a Republican and my mother was a Democrat. In Michigan, we always fought about sports, not politics.

What hurts the GOP is when we have leaders placing the blame on other leaders within the party.

It would be very difficult for me to stay in a marriage with a Republican at this point. Not that there's anything wrong with Republicans, but I happen to be a Democrat.

You know there's nothing a Hill Democrat would rather do than criticize another Democrat. It is their favorite activity. Then they can read about how honorable they are in an Op-Ed piece, how bipartisan.

Some of the United States' enemies now assume, perhaps rightly, that we hate each other so much that we'd sooner collaborate with them than do the difficult work of listening to each other. It doesn't need to be this way - but national recovery won't come from Washington. It has to start with you.

Congress, too, has changed in our time. There has grown a certain divisiveness. We have seen the hard looks and heard the statements in which not each other's ideas are challenged, but each other's motives. And our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other.

I still subscribe to the theory that Ronald Reagan once pronounced: that I will never speak ill will of my fellow Republican.