American Political System Quotes

#1. The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.

Ezra Klein

#2. If sexual intercourse, as the poets tell us, began in 1963, it was another decade and a half before the American political system began to take notice.

Michael Kinsley

#3. It is a central characteristic of the American political system that a wheelbarrow fetishist could be mayor of Omaha.

Charles L. Mee Jr.

#4. With all its faults, the American political system is the freest and most democratic in the world.

Eldridge Cleaver

#5. I have spent time discussing the American political system and current events in Taiwan with the junior diplomats, and they have repeatedly expressed their country's desire to avoid confrontation with China.

Michael K. Simpson

#6. It would seem that the Watergate story from beginning to end could be used as a primer on the American political system.

Bob Woodward

#7. What is the pope doing inserting himself - he's the Vicar of Christ. He is the worldwide leader of the Catholic faith. What is he doing inserting himself into the American political system this way? That to me is the larger question.

Rush Limbaugh

#8. We've become, now, an oligarchy instead of a democracy. I think that's been the worst damage to the basic moral and ethical standards to the American political system that I've ever seen in my life.

Jimmy Carter

#9. I just didn't understand the American political system, and I felt really stupid about that.

Drew Barrymore

#10. The word that identified what we did not possess was "money," . . . The other word was "votes," so that together "money votes" was "open sesame" to the deep caverns of the American political system.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

#11. Every time Bush talks about trust it makes chills run up and down my spine. The way he has trampled on the truth is a travesty of the American political system.

William J. Clinton

#12. In the American political system, you're only allowed to have real ideas if it's absolutely guaranteed that you can't win an election

P. J. O'Rourke

#13. The American political system is like fast food - mushy, insipid, made out of disgusting parts of things and everybody wants some.

P. J. O'Rourke

#14. The American political system is so porous, it's so open, it's so frustrating for those who are trying to make policy.

Michael Mandelbaum

#15. The Tea Party represents stakeholders in the American system; people who were never involved in politics or thought they had to be, yet realized that political corruption and incompetence threatened not only their families, but the future of the nation itself.

Tammy Bruce

#16. more tax breaks for the very rich is only one symptom of an economic and political system that is grotesquely failing the average American.

Bernie Sanders

#17. Within this historic and optimistic future in mind, I have made no value judgment of the destiny bestowed on each nation. For all this, however, leadership matters; so do the institutional structures and the system of political governance.

Patrick Mendis

#18. I think the only way that political system can be corrected is for the American people to see very vividly that it needs repair. If things are going to worse in the future, the American people, in every congressional district in the land, might demand that reforms take place in the political system.

Jimmy Carter

#19. There is a reason why these people [from Wall Street] are putting huge amounts of money into our political system. And in my view, it is undermining American democracy and it is allowing Congress to represent wealthy campaign contributors and not the working families of this country.

Bernie Sanders

#20. The greatness of America has grown out of a political and social system and a method of control of economic forces distinctly its own - our American system.

Herbert Hoover

#21. It was an example of a common phenomenon in American journalism (perhaps in social criticism in general), the shallow focusing on agents or on individuals, thus concealing what a deeper analysis would reveal - the failure of the government itself, indeed, of the political system.

Howard Zinn

#22. I came into American politics and into this political system proud of politics and the way we make decisions.

Byron Dorgan

#23. The American system of political spending is so unregulated that it might make Adam Smith rethink free markets.

Jon Meacham

#24. Populism is the simple premise that markets need to be restrained by society and by a democratic political system. We are not socialists or communists, we are proponents of regulated capitalism and, I might add, people who have read American history.

Molly Ivins

#25. The polarization of Congress; the decline of civility; and the rise of attack politics in the 1980s, the 1990s, and the early years of the new century are a blot on our political system and a disservice to the American people.

Edward Brooke

#26. And the American political spectrum is constrained by the expediencies of a two-party system that suppresses the potential emergence of breakaway movements responding to fleeting senses of urgency or perceived rigidity in the mainstream parties.

Justin Gest

#27. The genius of the American Founders was to create an intricate system of balanced powers both within the state and between state and society - a system that has fostered unprecedented political, social, and intellectual freedom.

Nancy Pearcey

#28. It's a historical phenomenon that in 250 years, a nation could move from a colony into the most prosperous nation of the world and the leader of the world. It is indeed an achievement, a tribute to the talent of the American nation, the American people and an optimal political and economic system.

Vladimir Putin

#29. How could such a destructive man [referring to Bush] be so popular with the American people? ... Not only is he poisoning our air and water - he's poisoning our political system as well.

Barbra Streisand

#30. Don't you get the idea I'm one of those goddam radicals. Don't get the idea I'm knocking the American system.

Al Capone

#31. I still have a great deal of faith in our political system and a great deal of faith in the American people and voter.

Sharron Angle

#32. The ability of the 1 percent to buy politicians and regulators is nothing new in American politics - just as inequality has been a permanent part of our economic system. This is true of virtually all political and economic systems.

Eric Alterman

#33. Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

Al Gore