Quotes & Sayings About Political Opponents

I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement in their fellow man, and have most hope in his goodness, who get the reputation of being his most carping critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of the possibilities of humankind in general, that he tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries to depict people as they are at any particular moment. The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The only time he attains even fleeting popularity is when his works can be used by some political faction as a stick to beat out the brains of their opponents. Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing. Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking hurts.
(John Dos Passos, 1957, from the speech he delivered upon accepting the Gold Medal for Eminence in Fiction from the National Institute of Arts and Letters) — John Dos Passos

It's not so much about the cause, it's about feeling superior to political opponents. — Glenn Reynolds

A wise nation should cultivate a political spirit that allows opponents to cooperate without fearing an automatic execution from their core supporters. Who knew that the real rogues in American politics would be the ones who dare to get along? — Jon Meacham

I still believe the Lewinsky investigation was way off from the focus of what Whitewater was, which turned out to be nothing at the end of the process. And I think that there were people who were determined as political opponents to not allow his presidency to succeed. — Rahm Emanuel

Once in power, Stalin's campaign to succeed Lenin required a legitimate heroic career which he did not possess because of his experience in what he called 'the dirty business' of politics: this could not be told, either because it was too gangsterish for a great, paternalistic statesman or because it was too Georgian for a Russian leader. His solution was a clumsy but all-embracing cult of personality that invented, distorted and concealed the truth. Ironically this self-promotion was so grotesque that it fanned sparks, sometimes innocent ones, which flared up into colossal anti-Stalin conspiracy-theories. It was easy for his political opponents, and later for us historians, to believe that it was all invented and that he had done nothing much at all - particularly since few historians had researched in the Caucasus where so much of his early career took place. An anti-cult, as erroneous as the cult itself, grew up around these conspiracy-theories. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

I always believe when your political opponents are committing suicide, there's no reason to murder them. — John Boehner

If you do not regard feminism with an uplifting sense of the gloriousness of woman's industrial destiny, or in the way, in short, that it is prescribed, by the rules of the political publicist, that you should, that will be interpreted by your opponents as an attack on woman. — Wyndham Lewis

I saw, during the midterm campaign of 2006, how difficult it was for opponents of stem cell research to run against hope. And so it was in the 2008 presidential contest. This was hope in the collective, a definition that should always apply to the expression of a people's political will. Christopher Reeve had believed in a formula: optimism + information = hope. In this case, the informing agent was us. Granted, it may all look different in six months to a year, but it is hard not to be buoyed by the desire for positive change as articulated and advanced by Barack Obama. It is okay to hope. This time the aspiration of many will not be derided as desperation by a few, as it was during the stem cell debate of '06.
By the time you read this book, President Obama and the 111th Congress will have established federal funding for stem cell research. The dam has broken.
Just as I'd hoped. — Michael J. Fox

Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. — Anonymous

I am a political recidivist. An incorrigible, repeat voter. A career lever-pusher. My electoral rap sheet is as long as your arm. Over the course of three decades, I have voted for presidents and school board members. I have voted in high hopes and high dudgeon. I have voted in favor of candidates and merely against their opponents. I have voted for propositions written with such complexity that I needed Noam Chomsky to deconstruct their meaning. I have been a single-issue voter and a marginal voter. I have even voted for people who ran unopposed. Hold an election and I'll be there. — Ellen Goodman

The Sangh Parivar, against which I had been waging a war, misled the people. My opponents used the Election Commission and the bureaucracy to win a political battle. — Lalu Prasad Yadav

Often dismissed or underestimated by political opponents, President Reagan had the most valuable weapon in the political arsenal: a bond with the people. — William L. Jenkins

Mudslinging - In politics, anything bad the opponent says about our candidate; in contrast, when our candidate does this, it is called 'making a good point. — Richard Turner

The adoption by Jefferson and the Republicans of the political structure of their opponents is of an importance hardly inferior to that of the adoption of the Constitution by the states. — Herbert Croly

Non-violent resistance implies the very opposite of weakness. Defiance combined with non-retaliatory acceptance of repression from one's opponents is active, not passive. It requires strength, and there is nothing automatic or intuitive about the resoluteness required for using non-violent methods in political struggle and the quest for Truth. — Mahatma Gandhi

If supporters of equality for women want to vote for the best candidate, they must look to a person regardless of gender and must disregard the gender of political opponents. — Karen DeCrow

[ ... ] it would be false to say that because we're on the side of justice, we can go ahead and destroy our opponents and the world will be at peace. [ ... ] Now, I know that there are such things as good and evil in the world, and that people do good things. But people who do good things are not necessarily good people, they just happen to be people who have done good things. The next instant they might wind up doing something bad, and if we don't take that into account in our view of humans, we'll constantly make mistakes when making political decisions or decisions about ourselves. — Hayao Miyazaki

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it's good for our ideological investment. — Kurt Andersen

We do not have time to play at "oppositions" at "conferences." We will keep our political opponents ... whether open or disguised as "nonparty," in prison. — Vladimir Lenin

You often see in Washington those who disagree you described as stupid or evil. It's one of the most unfortunate trends of modern political discourse. Portraying opponents as too dumb to know the truth but smart enough and wanting people to suffer. — Ted Cruz

It is not the principled partisan, however obnoxious he may seem to his opponents, who degrades our public debate, but the preening, self-styled statesman who elevates compromise to a first principle. — Tom DeLay

Primarily affecting low-information voters and members of the mainstream media, Obama Worship Syndrome attributes impossible capabilities to Obama's political opponents, finds excuses for every Obama failure in everyone around him and praises the president as the finest politician - nay, human being - of our time. — Ben Shapiro

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - not our political opponents, and certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker, who would have us believe. — John McCain

I understand the harsh feelings and sentiments from my opponents and their supporters because I myself have been defeated twice in my political life in the past and I understand very well it is hard to accept your own failure. — Chen Shui-bian

The basic theme of a hostile environment that seeks to destroy the ideology has many variations. Hitler fought his life-and-death struggle against a coalition (constructed by him alone) of 'Jewish, plutocratic and Bolshevik powers supported by the Vatican'; Ulrike Meinhof's indignation was directed against 'the German parliamentary coalition, the American government, the police, the state and university authorities, the bourgeois, the Shah of Iran, the multinational corporations, the capitalist system'; the opponents of nuclear energy imagine themselves up against a powerful, monolithic alliance of irresponsible corporations, the powers of high finance, and all the institutions that are slave to it: courts, authorities, universities, as well as other research institutions, and political parties. — Paul Watzlawick

A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones. — Alasdair MacIntyre

The point of a presidential campaign is to put the candidate through the ringer: to force him to get banged up by his opponents and the press, and to have to answer the difficult and uncomfortable questions, be investigated, and learn the thrust and parry of political swordplay. — Monica Crowley

Politically, Obama's amazing streak of self-destructing opponents who have lain beneath his feet during his unlikely political career appears to be holding. — Eric Alterman

Candidates who win while spending less than their opponents still usually have to spend quite a lot. While not a surefire guarantor of victory, a large war chest -even if not the largest-is usually a necessary condition. Money may not guarantee victory, but the lack of it usually guarantees defeat. Without large sums, there is rarely much of a campaign, as poorly funded 'minor' candidates have repeatedly discovered. — Michael Parenti

As of Election Day, Lincoln had successfully avoided not only his three opponents, but also his own running mate, Hannibal Hamlin. Republicans had nominated the Maine senator for vice president without Lincoln's knowledge, much less his consent - true to another prevailing political custom that left such choices exclusively to the delegates - in an attempt to balance the Chicago convention's choice of a Westerner for the presidency. — Harold Holzer

True leadership will not be measured by the ability to muzzle dissent, or to intimidate and harass political opponents at home. The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history. — Barack Obama

Once upon a time my political opponents honored me as possessing the fabulous intellectual and economic power by which I created a worldwide depression all by myself. — Herbert Hoover

Our opponents maintain that we are confronted with insurmountable political obstacles, but that may be said of the smallest obstacle if one has no desire to surmount it. — Theodor Herzl

The 'either-or' dogmatism, the stubbornly principled refusal to entertain compromise or concession, had served him well and had invariably proved successful in his political 'career' as long as he was combating weak, divided, and irresolute opponents. But it was a massive and insuperable obstacle when enemy positions were strong and united, when initiative had been irretrievably lost, bargaining power was weakening by the day, and more flexible military tactics and more subtle political skills were desperately needed. Not — Ian Kershaw

Your neighbors are not all sheep. Your political opponents are not all evil or fools. Try talking to those you despise. They are your fellow citizens. And together, we are not lesser than any "greatest generation.". — David Brin

I have also been attacked by my opponents as someone seeking to purge university faculties of leftist professors. This is false. The first provision of the Academic Bill of Rights is that no professor should be hired or fired because of his or her political views. I have never myself called for the firing of any professor for his or her political views, nor would I. — David Horowitz

Well, human rights defenders, freedom of speech advocates, lawyers that we spoke to said this is really an expansion. After the military ouster of Egypt's unpopular, but elected Islamist president in 2013, we saw political opponents being arrested by the thousands, really. Then we saw a popular comedian go off the air out of fear of retribution. — Leila Fadel

Singling out political opponents for working against the ruling party is precisely the tactic of every tyrannical government from Red China to Venezuela. The first step in the process is creating unfounded public suspicion of political opponents, followed by arresting and jailing any who continue speaking against the regime. — John Carter

You can't let a candidate run for too long. He will be dragged along, cut apart, put back together and ripped to shreds again - from both the political opponents and the media. — Peer Steinbruck

Never quit politicking and never underestimate your opponent. — Gus Franklin Mutscher

I'm not sure why I enjoy debunking. Part of it surely is amusement over the follies of true believers, and [it is] partly because attacking bogus science is a painless way to learn good science. You have to know something about relativity theory, for example, to know where opponents of Einstein go wrong ... Another reason for debunking is that bad science contributes to the steady dumbing down of our nation. Crude beliefs get transmitted to political leaders and the result is considerable damage to society. — Martin Gardner

My job as Labour Home Secretary is to ensure people are prepared to listen to us when we take on our opponents across the political spectrum. — David Blunkett

I dealt with people with diverse political views. If you find people who are your political opponents, and talk to them for an hour, chances are you're going to like them, and they're not full of hate. — Cass Sunstein

The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections. — Kathleen Troia McFarland

If candidates spend money on ads and other political speech and their opponents are rewarded with government handouts to attack them, that chills speech and is unconstitutional. Non-participating candidates certainly don't volunteer to allow their opponents to receive taxpayer subsidies to bash them. — Bradley A. Smith

The Federalists also used bribes, intimidation, and fraud against opponents of the Constitution. — Michael Parenti

It has been a source of great pain to me to have met with so many among [my] opponents who had not the liberality to distinguish between political and social opposition; who transferred at once to the person, the hatred they bore to his political opinions. — Thomas Jefferson

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape - to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance. — Henry Kissinger

Article II of the articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon was just the simple fact that he talked about and suggested the potential use of the IRS against one or two political opponents. — Monica Crowley

Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents. — David Frum

Ward Churchill might be more valuable to the opponents of the academic left employed than unemployed. Above all, he can serve as a living window into the intellectual, moral, and political bankruptcy of the left. — Mort Kondracke

The language of these Soviet show trials ... could only be understood in the Aesopian imagery of the closed Bolshevik universe of conspiracies of evil against good in which 'terrorism' simply signified 'any doubt about the policies or character of Stalin.' All his political opponents were per se assassins. More than two 'terrorists' was a 'conspiracy' ... — Simon Sebag Montefiore