Party System Quotes

#1. Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers.

Pat Buchanan

#2. A two-party system is way too good for those two parties.

Penn Jillette

#3. Nobody should have any illusions. The United States has essentially a one-party system and the ruling party is the business party.

Noam Chomsky

#4. The two party system just means that the corporations cut two checks instead of one.

Barry Crimmins

#5. I am sure that the party system is right and necessary. There must be some scum.

A.P. Herbert

#6. I think the executives have matured enough so that they recognize that we have a two-party system. In California, we have more than a two-party system.

Lew Wasserman

#7. The real two-party system in America is the Meanies and the Weenies. The Meanies want to take away your benefits, and the Weenies want to compromise with them.

Alan Grayson

#8. Yet no suffering befalls whoever relinquishes justice and truth, whereas the party system has painful penalties to chastise insubordination. These

Simone Weil

#9. How can one conceive of a one-party system in a country that has over two hundred varieties of cheese?

Charles De Gaulle

#10. Because of the structure of the contemporary American party system, every president is polarizing.

Larry J. Sabato

#11. Is there anyone ... who will maintain that the Party System could have been created by people particularly fond of truth?

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#12. I agree that the two-party system stomps on any kind of competition. A great first step is to open the presidential debates to all qualified candidates, including the Libertarians. If that happens, the Libertarian party will experience unprecedented growth.

Gary Johnson

#13. I don't know if you've noticed, but our two-party system is a bowl of shit looking at itself in the mirror.

Lewis Black

#14. I think there's a lot of problems with being a two-party system.

Meg White

#15. I was never interested in the two-party system per se. I was interested in how authority was abused by government, and how lies were told, and rewritten, to seem to be true. I came up out of a tradition of radical journalism.

Jules Feiffer

#16. Saying we should keep the two-party system simply because it is working is like saying the Titanic voyage was a success because a few people survived on life rafts.

Eugene McCarthy

#17. In a one-party system there is always a landslide.

Philip K. Dick

#18. Democracy means the power of the people and the possibility of influencing the governing parties. Russia had had enough experience with a one-party-system - we will not go back there.

Vladimir Putin

#19. I did vote Obama. But I've never believed in the authenticity of the two-party system.

Marilyn Manson

#20. In Cuba, taking into account the long fight for our independence and sovereignty, we will defend the one-party system in the face of the games, demagogy and the marketing of politics.

Raul Castro

#21. As much as I cherish your [McCarthy's] right to a platform as an independent candidate I am not going to sit here quietly and listen to you denigrate the two party system. It has served our country well over the last two hundred years.

John Anderson

#22. We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.

J. William Fulbright

#23. The free electoral process is one of the things that outsiders envy most about this country.The distinctly American two-party system is perpetuated through that process.

Robert A. Agresta

#24. Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.

Pat Buchanan

#25. I am more convinced than ever that a lively two party system is essential to our democracy.

Stockwell Day

#26. The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#27. 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

#28. It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.

G.K. Chesterton

#29. The budget enforcement rules of the 1990s were an important part of getting the budget back into balance. It was done on a bipartisan basis. Those pay-as-you-go rules were tested and they worked. We are now in a one-party system, and we have thrown them out.

Melissa Bean

#30. In a two-party system, if both parties ignore public opinion, there is no place voters can turn.

Howard Zinn

#31. I do think that we may be looking at a period in the next few years where the two-party system will fracture.

Jonathan Tasini

#32. George McGovern and his supporters committed what, in a two-party system, are capital crimes: they did not compromise, they took hard ideological positions, they alienated a large portion of their party's traditional supporters, and they lost - very, very badly.

Elliott Abrams

#33. In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.

Noam Chomsky

#34. If the Dalai Lama joins one party, then that makes it hard for the system to work.

Dalai Lama

#35. And under our system, much like you see in the U.K., of course, a party working with another party can form a coalition and govern the country.

Rick Mercer

#36. We begin the path toward defeating Mexico's real adversary, who represents authoritarianism and the worst antidemocratic practice, who represents a return to corruption as a system and impunity as conviction. That adversary is Pena Nieto and his party.

Josefina Vazquez Mota

#37. In former days, when there were Whigs instead of Liberals, it was almost a rule of political life that all leading Whigs sould be uncles, brothers-in-law, or cousins to each other. This was pleasant and gave great consistency to the party; but the system has now gone out of vogue.

Anthony Trollope

#38. When you explain to people how this country [US] works, because we have a presidential single member district system there is no way to start a third party without injuring your friends that is if you start a liberal party you are going to elect conservatives and vice versa.

William Domhoff

#39. The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.

Henry Adams

#40. It's become clear (to me, at least) that the entire credit card system in the United States is currently set up so that any one party to a transaction can reliably transfer the blame for an incident, dispute, or fraud to another party. The

Brian Krebs

#41. I think we're probably more unified than ever before because we're in a battle for survival. Not only for survival as the Republican Party, but survival of the check and balance system in our government.

Bill Scott

#42. A believing man will be a zealous man. Faith makes a man zealous. Faith shows itself by zeal. Not by zeal for a party or a system or an opinion; but by zeal for Christ - zeal for His church - zeal for the carrying on of His work on earth.

Horatius Bonar

#43. Most people in this country believe that the American Communist Party and its dupes are the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. This is a serious mistake.

John T. Flynn

#44. The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch.

Thomas Reed

#45. Have never met a person who possessed a privilege who did not exercise that privilege to the fullest extent that they possibly could. Say what you like of a belief, of a party, of a finance system, of a power - all I see is privilege and its consequences.

Robert Jackson Bennett

#46. In our system of government, an opposition party doesn't have the ability to pass legislation, but it has the ability to massively screw things up.

Alex Pareene

#47. The House Of Commons has never been a tea-party. It consists of strong-minded, often very idealistic people, who are trying to accomplish something for our country. We are inheritors of an adversarial system and that, in itself, fosters conflict.

John Allen Fraser

#48. We should be the pro-legal immigration party. A party that has a positive platform and agenda on how we can create a legal immigration system that works for immigrants and works for America.

Marco Rubio

#49. The western mindset erroneously equates a political system of multi-party democracy with high-quality institutions ... the two are not synonymous.

Dambisa Moyo

#50. The system he (President Hosni Mubarak) is recommending would make it virtually impossible for truly independent parties to participate. Sham democracy should be exposed for what it truly is.

Madeleine Albright

#51. The longer I lived in China, the more I sensed that the Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The Party has unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history - and spawned, perhaps, the greatest threat to its own survival.

Evan Osnos

#52. We have a complete void of progressive politics in this country right now. The will of the people goes ignored and unrealized. I'm searching for the people that can enter the political system, a strong third party. We need to consolidate.

Ani DiFranco

#53. In New Zealand, we have a one-party disclosure system, where if one of you knows you're being recorded, it's completely fine. It doesn't matter if the other person doesn't know. Look, I'm not breaking new ground by recording people who don't want to be recorded.

David Farrier

#54. In Jordan, where the prime minister is always a commoner, the king has announced some new reforms that would tend to move the country toward a more democratic system: Notably, the prime minister would emerge from the victorious political party, not from back room conversations in the royal palace.

Elliott Abrams

#55. A system of education, which would not gratify this disposition in any party, is requisite, in order to obviate the difficulty, and the reader will find a something said to that purpose in perusing this tract.

Joseph Lancaster

#56. The thing they're trying to stop is 30-million people getting health insurance. That's the substance.

Chris Hayes

#57. 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

#58. No matter how advanced the system, no matter how precise, unless we have the will to communicate, there's no connection. And even supposing the will is there, there are times like now when we don't know the other party's number. Or even if we know the number, we misdial.

Haruki Murakami

#59. There are cycles in American politics. US cycles are even more pronounced because we Americans have a totally entrepreneurial presidential system. We don't have parliamentary opposition parties with a shadow prime minister and shadow cabinets. Every four years, the opposition reinvents itself.

Charles Krauthammer

#60. The reverse is a system in which you basically let people who were leaders in one way or another - people sometimes decried as party bosses, people who are part of special interests make the decision. And I think that's a worse system than the one we have.

Geoffrey Cowan

#61. I want to see everyone contribute to the overall costs of the system, and with their entire earnings. I'm convinced that an objective discussion will reveal that the differences between the parties, which have been greatly exaggerated in some quarters, aren't that significant after all.

Angela Merkel

#62. The GOP's thirst for confrontation and crisis is symptomatic of a destructive and nihilistic streak that has overtaken our political system. When one party repudiates the whole concept of compromise, it is inevitable that the government will lurch from one crisis to another.

Mike Lofgren

#63. Thirty years people have been asking for a lawful system of immigration to end this lawlessness, and government on both parties have refused to give it to them.

Jeff Sessions

#64. There's something wildy decadent about the young-star lifestyle, and I just don't really see the point. I got my partying out of my system in college.

Anne Hathaway

#65. I went through two pretty dark years being fed up with the system and frustrated with my own party after two disastrous elections in 2006 and 2008.

Jim DeMint

#66. The future of the Republican Party and the future of America is based on a values system and the issues that drive those values are on our side.

Tim Scott

#67. The great disadvantage of our present electoral system is that it freezes the pattern of politics, and holds together the incompatible because everyone assumes that if a party splits it will be electorally slaughtered.

Roy Jenkins

#68. China is a one party state. Sooner or later China will get to the point when the new social classes, which have emerged thanks to economic success, will have to be integrated into the political system. There is no guarantee that this process will run smoothly.

Henry A. Kissinger

#69. The tea party venerates the Constitution while despising the political system it has produced.

Gideon Rachman

#70. From this experience we have learned that in a big party it is important to have the necessary and often controversial discussions on policy issues such as the health system while in opposition.

Angela Merkel

#71. When it comes to immigration reform, now is the time ... I've never seen a better political environment ... I'm not doing immigration reform to solve the Republican Party's political problem. I'm trying to save our nation from, I think, a shortage of labor and a catastrophic broken system.

Lindsey Graham

#72. We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights-older than our political parties, older than our school system.

William O. Douglas

#73. All I will say is that there are particular features of the American constitutional system that renders a third party futile - at best.

Todd Gitlin

#74. A totalitarian regime thus has one political party, one educational system, one artistic creed, one centrally planned economy, one unified media, and one moral code. In a totalitarian state there are no independent schools, no private businesses, no grassroots organizations, and no critical thought.

Anne Applebaum

#75. I'm such a homebody. I don't party. I don't drink. That may be because I got it out all out of my system before I was 18.

Olivia Thirlby

#76. Islam is more than a religion, it's much more than a religion, it's a way of life, it is a one party political system that has a very elaborate legal system that can put you to death if you leave it.

Reza Aslan

#77. Our political system needs changing. It needs to move away from personalities and patronage to a system of party programs and consultation with the people.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

#78. Where 'Dragon Quest Monsters' originated from was 'Dragon Quest V,' where you had a monster befriending system as a main part: you could actually befriend monsters and have them fight on behalf of your party, as part of your party.

Yuji Horii

#79. A cardinal principle in systems theory is that all parties that have a stake in a system should be represented in its management.

Malcolm Knowles

#80. The fact is that in a way, journalists become a kind of default in the system when you don't have substantive two-party back-and-forth inside of the government.

Ron Suskind

#81. But as in all cults, what's central to the Communist Party is the belief system and the elimination of nuance. From there you're very slowly led down the road to fanaticism and mass murder.

Alexei Sayle

#82. So far as I am aware no leader of a party of the European left in the past twenty-five years has declared capitalism as such to be unacceptable as a system. The only public figure to do so unhesitatingly was Pope John Paul II.

Eric Hobsbawm

#83. When the left party in a system severs its bonds to working people - when it dedicates itself to the concerns of a particular slice of high-achieving affluent people - issues of work and income inequality will inevitably fade from its list of concerns.

Thomas Frank

#84. I am not a Federalist," he declared in 1789, "because I never submitted the whole system of my opinions to the creed of any party of men whatever. ... If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.

Joseph J. Ellis

#85. Principle says it's not who put forth an idea. It's not the position of the person who put forth an idea; it's not the longevity of the person or the party of the person. That's not what it is at all. In a power system, that's the way it works. But in a principle system, it's what it says.

Dan Webster

#86. No political party can ever make prohibition effective. A political party implies an adverse, an opposing, political party. To enforce criminal statutes implies substantial unanimity in the community. This is the result of the jury system. Hence the futility of party prohibition.

Rutherford B. Hayes

#87. Unlike the Tea Party, who see themselves as the customers of government, people in the Occupy Wall Street movement understand that we are the government. Stated most simply, we are trying to run a 21st-century society on a 13th-century economic operating system. It just doesn't work.

Douglas Rushkoff

#88. The two party electoral system performs the essential function of helping to legitimate the existing social order.

Michael Parenti

#89. Team Work is the essence of good governance. It is necessary to form a team within the party and also within the administrative system.

Narendra Modi

#90. You don't choose a party because it's the flavour of the month. I feel I will be able to work under a political system. I feel if people like me don't enter politics to bring change, who will?

Nandan Nilekani

#91. I view derivatives as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.

Warren Buffett

#92. So all the system was running down and collapsing. Mrs. Thatcher became the leader of the Conservative Party in February 1975, and she clearly wanted to strike out and do something different.

Kenneth Baker

#93. It is one of the misfortunes of our political system that parties are formed more with reference to controversies that are gone by than to the controversies which these parties have actually to decide.

Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess Of Salisbury

#94. Republican Party is the party that stands for the people who are trying to start a business out of the spare bedroom of their home, who are trying to give their kids a better life. And the only way that's possible is through the America free enterprise system.

Marco Rubio

#95. Let's just say that once the party was over, the Tribe had the decency to put most of the things back into place with the possible, and otherwise notable, exception of the platypus and a moronic drinking game that later evolved into the imperial measurement system.

Sorin Suciu

#96. I got to dislike parties, like Jefferson and Madison. I think they're harmful. But the system is flawed so badly. I like what Plato said, long ago. Democracy is fit only for a small country. Can't survive in a large country.

Jack Kevorkian

#97. In a government like ours, the Crown is the abiding and unshakable element in government; politicians may come and go, but the Crown remains and certain aspects of our system pertain to it which are not dependent on any political party. In this sense, the Crown is the consecrated spirit of Canada.

Robertson Davies

#98. People who live in the post-totalitarian system know only too well that the question of whether one or several political parties are in power, and how these parties define and label themselves, is of far less importance than the question of whether or not it is possible to live like a human being.

Vaclav Havel