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You can compromise between good, better, and best, and you can compromise between bad and worse and terrible. But you can't compromise between good and evil. And now people look at the other side as a completely different kind of animal and say, 'They are taking the country down the road to purgatory.' It's complete intolerance.

Politics is compromise.

If you look through history, all of the great work we've done in Congress has been around a table of compromise, when it comes to the most difficult problems.

It's time to recognize what compromise means: no side wins or loses all.

First of all, let me just say what's interesting about American politics is that if things really get bad here, people say nasty things about you. From a global perspective, if politics get bad, you die, so let's just keep some perspective here.

One of the problems the Republican Party has had is that we're too fast to compromise. You can compromise on the little stuff, but you can't compromise on your core principles.

People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about.

There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.

I touched the limits of our political system, which pushes one to last-minute compromises. Explanations are rarely given. It plays to people's fears because it hasn't built an ideological consensus. It produces flawed solutions and too often ignores reality.

From where many of us in the U.K. sit, American politics is hopelessly polarized. All kinds of issues get bundled up into two great heaps. The rest of the world, today and across the centuries, simply doesn't see things in this horribly oversimplified way.