Political Progress Quotes

True liberalism seeks all legitimate freedom first in the confident belief that without such freedom the pursuit of all other blessings and benefits is vain. That belief is the foundation of all American progress, political as well as economic.

The Freedom Caucus represents a pessimistic, divisive, and gerrymandered view of our nation. If America is to make progress, we must step forward from this form of politics - not just because we disagree with this or that policy but because it is fundamentally undemocratic and tyrannical.

Progressives believe in making progress, which is why I'm proud to endorse Hillary Clinton, who I know will continue fighting to ensure our children and grandchildren can achieve their highest and best dreams.

I think what Americans need and what Mainers need more than anything is government that functions and I think that the filibuster prevents us from functioning and making progress on issues.

Nations, like plants and human beings, grow. And if the development is thwarted they are dwarfed and overshadowed.

Any country is either becoming more democratic or less democratic. I think the United States hasn't tended to its journey toward democracy in a long time.

Stop sending out press releases and start passing some bills...

We seek in Central America not peace alone, not peace to be followed someday by political progress, but peace and democracy, together, indivisible, an end to the shedding of human blood, which is inseparable from an end to the suppression of human rights.

Simply as an exercise in efficient politics, Obama '08 rewrote the textbook. His accomplishment was historic and one that transformed how race and politics intersect in our society. Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every day.

What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform.

Together with President Obama, we are moving America forward, not back.

I am so blessed that I have been able to live long enough to see a woman nominated for president.

I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime.

Some people might have different ideas about what progress looks like, and some are cynical and place their short-term political interests ahead of what is good for our country. But many of them aren't cynical and try hard to do their best.

It's taken over 240 years for there to be a Native American woman elected to congress, so it's definitely significant that we were able to accomplish that.

All political action aims at either preservation or change.

I don't think my election as Taoiseach actually made history - it just reflected it, reflected the enormous changes that had already occurred in our country.

Political and social change is always a stagger-step process.

Nobody wants a stalemate in constitutional development.

The most important lesson of New Labour is this: Every time we made progress we did it by challenging the conventional wisdom.

Like a lot of people, I had this naive hope that Barack Obama would fix everything quickly. You know, the culture of celebrity in this country leads us away from democratic ways of thinking and into this hero worship. And so of course, one man cannot swoop in and fix everything on his own. It's much more complicated and difficult than that, and progressives in this country since then have had to come to terms with the fact that we need to do more than actually get out of our house and vote. It's an ongoing process to turn the tide.

I am under no illusion that amending the Voting Rights Act in Congress will be easy, but with bipartisan calls for legislation to address it, I'm confident we are moving in the right direction.

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium.

We were on the way to democracy. We didn't say that we are fully democratic, we were on the way, we were moving forward. Slowly or fast, that's subjective, cannot be objective, that's always subjective. But we're moving forward in that regard.