Political Quotes

“I want to thank the distinguished and always eloquent gentleman from Georgia for his comments on a number of interesting things. One is the question of bipartisanship and us working together, and I think the gentleman correctly invites us to study the record of legislative success and achievements in our body. It is true that the best legislation, like the Voting Rights Act, for example, is legislation that came through a bipartisan process where we had both parties working together. All of our great Presidents have been people who themselves were involved in partisan politics, and often in a bare-knuckled way, but also, once they were in office, called the country to try to speak across party lines. Jefferson said, ``We are all republicans. We are all federalists'' in his inaugural address in 1800. And Lincoln, of course, said: We are friends; we must not be enemies. We must be friends, and we must not be enemies. And President Obama said: We are not the red States of America; we are not the blue States of America. We are the United States of America. And so we have to try to aspire to that even though we work in a party system. And the reason we have a party system is because we are not a one-party dictatorship. One way to get rid of partisanship is you get rid of political parties and you have a one-party state. But we don't believe in that. We have got political freedom in America.…”