Thomas E. Mann Quotes

Presidents are elected not by direct popular vote but by 538 members of the Electoral College.

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

But presidential approval also became a surrogate measure of national unity and patriotism.

Knowledge of the soul would unfailingly make us melancholy if the pleasures of expression did not keep us alert and of good cheer.

We are not separate and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way.

America is an outlier in the world of democracies when it comes to the structure and conduct of elections.

Responsibility for overseeing the implementation of election law typically resides with partisan officials, many with public stakes in the election outcome.

A healthy degree of party unity among Democrats and Republicans has deteriorated into bitter partisan warfare.

Further-more, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured.

Votes in federal elections are cast and counted in a highly decentralized and variable fashion, with no uniform ballots and few national standards.

While Republican voters have remained universally supportive of their President, Democrats and Independents are returning to a more naturally critical stance.

Congress requires states to draw single-member districts.

Human reason needs only to will more strongly than fate, and she is fate.

With the parties at virtual parity and the ideological gulf between them never greater, the stakes of majority control of Congress are extremely high.

Speech is civilization itself. The word, even the most contradictions word, preserves contact - it is silence which isolates.

It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available.

The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.

Some of necessities go astray, because for them there is no such thing as a right path.

Beer soothes the upset soul.

Science never makes an advance until philosophy authorizes it to do so.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence.

The only religious way to think of death is as part and parcel of life.

He (Newt Gingrich as a freshman congressman) was both passionate about his goals and coldly analytical in his means.