We started tearing down the seniority system on Capitol Hill. All of that begins in the '70s. It accelerates and continues in the '90s, and it's going on to this day.

In science we kill our hypothesis instead of each other.

People think that politics just somehow magically organizes itself. It doesn't work that way. You need to assemble these huge coalitions of 535 politicians on Capitol Hill, and tens of thousands of interest groups, and tens of millions of voters, and assemble all those in government to get stuff done.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism; it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Parties and political systems used to be about excluding renegades who would never play well with others in government. Now it's actually systematically screening them in.

There were big problems with every system, and there always have been.

Compromise is what it's got to be all about when you're governing, because no one is ever going to have a big enough majority to just do what they want to do all the time.