I understand that the hyper-partisanship in Washington makes people feel alienated. They're frustrated and they're angry, and they should be, but they can do something about it. We've got to turn it around. I'm concerned it's going to become institutionalized. … Make candidates accountable for making government work. That should be a debate question: What are you going to do to make government work? You can't sit on your hands and say, "No, I want it 100% my way." I don't know how this evolved, but I find it irrational — you don't demand that in any other sphere of life. The country is now in a virtual standstill. We can't begin to measure the reverberation of all this legislative neglect five, six, or whatever years into the future.

As quoted in "Can Olympia Snowe Change Washington?", interview by Kathleen Fleury and Virginia M. Wright, in Downeast magazine (October 2014).