Clinton Rossiter famous quotes

Dictatorship played a decisive role in the North's successful effort to maintain the Union by force of arms...one man was the government of the United States...Lincoln was a great dictator....This great constitutional dictator was self appointed.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#War #Successful #Men

A gathering of Democrats is more sweaty, disorderly, offhand, and rowdy than a gathering of Republicans; it is also likely to be more cheerful, imaginative, tolerant of dissent, and skillful at the game of give-and-take. A gathering of Republicans is more respectable, sober, purposeful, and businesslike than a gathering of Democrats; it is also likely to be more self-righteous, pompous, cut-and-dried, and just plain boring.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Cutting #Self #Games

Conservatism is the worship of dead revolutions.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Revolution #Worship #Conservatism

The final greatness of the presidency lies in the truth that it is not just an office of incredible power but a breeding ground of indestructible myth.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Lying #Greatness #Office

No America without democracy, no democracy without politics no politics without parties, no parties without compromise and moderation.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Party #America #Democracy

No form of government can survive that excludes dictatorship when the life of the nation is at stake.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Government #Form #Stakes

The Americans of 1776 were among the first men in modern society to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty.... Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory sits in its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Past #Men #America

There is "no happiness without liberty, no liberty without self-government, no self-government without constitutionalism, no constitutionalism without morality--and none of these great goods without stability and order.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Government #Self #Order

The most momentous fact about the pattern of American politics is that we live under a persistent, obdurate, one might almost say tyrannical, two-party system. We have the Republicans and we have the Democrats, and we have almost no one else, no other strictly political aggregate that amounts to a corporal's guard in the struggle for power.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Party #Struggle #Two

The image the Republicans have of themselves needs the image they have of the Democrats to bring it into sharp focus. The Democrats are plainly a disreputable crowd; the Republicans, by contrast, are men of standing and sobriety. Many a middle-class American in many a small town has had to explain painfully why he chose to be a Democrat. No middle-class American need feel uneasy as a Republican. Even when he is a minority--for example, among the heathen on a college campus--he can, like any white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, warm himself before his little fire of self-esteem.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Self Esteem #Men #College

The establishment of religious freedom was no less momentous an achievement than the clearing of the great forest or the winning of independence, for the twin doctrines of separation of church and state and liberty of individual conscience are the marrow of our democracy, if not indeed America's most magnificent contribution to the freeing of Western man.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Religious #Winning #Men

Even if a government can be constitutional without being democratic, it cannot be democratic without being constitutional.
-- Clinton Rossiter

#Government #Democratic