Grover Norquist quotes:

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  • The Democratic Party is made up of trial lawyers, labor unions, government employees, big city political machines, the coercive utopians, the radical environmentalists, feminists, and others who want to restructure society with tax dollars and government fiat.

  • Smaller government, more individual responsibility, more individual control creates more Republicans. More state power and ownership and control and top-down decision-making creates more Democrats.

  • What's hurting the U.S. economy is total government spending. The deficit is an indicator that the government is spending so much money that it can't even get around to stealing all of the money that it wants to spend. But the tip of the iceberg is not what hit the Titanic - it was the 90 percent of the iceberg under water.

  • Conservatives should insist that defense spending be examined with the same seriousness that we demand in examining the books of those government agencies that spend taxpayer money in the name of welfare, the environment, or education.

  • Americans for Tax Reform is a national taxpayer organization dedicated to opposing any and all tax increases. We work at the national, state and local level for lower taxes, less government spending and limited government.

  • We plan to pick up another five seats in the Senate and hold the House through redistricting through 2012. And rather than negotiate with the teachers' unions and the trial lawyers and the various leftist interest groups, we intend to break them.

  • A lot of young people just starting out unskilled, as all Americans do when they're born here, come to this country, and so the business community is for immigration. Big businesses, small businesses, high-tech, low-tech, the communities of faith, and the Republican leadership.

  • It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

  • Spending should be transparent. All spending by the Pentagon should be online. Every check. Exceptions should be made for legitimate national security issues. But military and civilian pay and retirement benefits are not state secrets. This has already been done in many state governments.

  • Government should enforce rule of law. It should enforce contracts, it should protect people bodily from being attacked by criminals. And when the government does those things, it is facilitating liberty. When it goes beyond those things, it becomes destructive to both human happiness and human liberty.

  • Spending an extra dollar on the D.C. public school system isn't spending an extra dollar on education. Spending an extra dollar with the Pentagon doesn't buy you an extra dollar on defense. Republicans need to look skeptically at military spending.

  • My wife and I have what's known as mixed marriage. I am a Methodist, she is a Muslim. So we're keeping it in the M's.

  • Twenty-five years ago, I created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge at the federal level. Then I brought it to the state and local level. About 97 percent of the Republicans in the House and 85 percent in the Senate have signed on, and the number of candidates who have taken the pledge is even higher. It's become a party position.

  • Income should be taxed one time at one rate, not again and again.

  • If you have to change the law to get more money, that's a tax increase, and Americans for Tax Reform supports all efforts of tax reform, getting rid of deductions or credits, or something that's misclassified, as long as you at the same time reduce rates so that it's not a hidden tax.

  • Being married is kind of like being a Ken-doll; you don't get to dress yourself anymore.

  • Clinton and Obama practice this politics known quaintly as the Richard Speck strategy: if you cannot take on everyone in the room at once, take them out of the room one at a time.

  • If you feel the government should leave you alone, you're a Republican. If you think the job of the government is to go push people around and take things for you, then you're a Democrat.

  • Wars are expensive and dangerous. They're not political winners.

  • Less government, less regulation, lower taxes.

  • Someday I hope Americans will not believe that anyone had to spend his or her days fighting for limited government because everyone they know wants maximum freedom and minimum statism.

  • The job of the government isn't to go around and try and make people sacrifice, it's to try and make people free. The reason why we have a national defense is to protect our freedoms.

  • I run a taxpayer group - the most powerful guy in D.C., nonsense. OK? There are buildings with thousands of people in them, all lobbying for more spending and higher levels of spending and more government commitments. And there are a handful - a handful of groups that fight for less spending.

  • Most Republicans have made it very clear they're not interested in raising taxes. They want to reform government.

  • As more and more Americans own shares of stock, more and more Americans understand that taxing businesses is taxing them. Regulating businesses is taxing them. They ought to be thinking long-term about their ownership, not just their income, and that they should pay taxes on capital, as well as taxes on labor.

  • Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged. It's one of those taxes that most clearly damages economic growth and jobs.

  • Taxation is not charity. It is not voluntary. As we shrink the state and make government smaller, we will find that more and more people are able to take care of themselves.

  • Tax reductions are usually simpler and less distortive. I'm certainly willing to look at getting rid of tax deductions/credits, and go to dramatically reduced rates.

  • Well, certainly the Democrats have been arguing to raise the capital gains tax on all Americans. Obama says he wants to do that. That would slow down economic growth. It's not necessarily helpful to the economy. Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged.

  • I know the activists I deal with, we sort of try and check each other to make sure that we haven't gone native, that you come to Washington thinking it's a cesspool, you don't want to end up thinking it's really a hot tub and getting used to it. So that's something one has to keep an eye on all the time.

  • Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith.

  • People learn their politics at a young age and tend to stick with it.

  • There are 100 different doors to come into the conservative movement. You can disagree with 99 of them, as long as you agree on one: more-limited government.

  • Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

  • The important thing about tax reform is you make the tax code less complicated, easier for people to understand.

  • Look, the center right coalition in American politics today is best understood as a coalition of groups and individuals that on the issue that brings them to politics what they want from the government is to be left alone.

  • Obama is a guy who claims to be unaware that there was a Tea Party, a guy that's detached from the country.

  • The goal is to reduce the size and scope of government spending, not to focus on the deficit. The deficit is the symptom of the disease.

  • I was a math guy as a kid. I was really good at math. I wasn't particularly interested in it.

  • Reforming Social Security to make it fully funded and independently held, that's compassionate because it allows people to control their own lives; cutting taxes on families and all Americans to let people have more control over their lives.

  • The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.

  • We want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

  • Historically, opposition to immigration in the United States has been racially and religiously motivated in the ugliest, nastiest way possible.

  • We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

  • I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.

  • The welfare state creates its own victim/client constituency. By making individuals free and independent, we reduce the need for 'charity' to those truly needy citizens what we can certainly afford to help through real charity.

  • My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit.

  • I want to reduce the size of government in half as a percentage of GNP [gross national product] over the next 25 years. We want to reduce the number of people depending on government so there is more autonomy and more free citizens.

  • Which idiot put the GOP convention the same time as 'Burning Man' in Nevada? Is there time to change this?

  • Obama has been perhaps the most partisan President since Truman. He hasn't learned to be civil - note his insulting speech to Paul Ryan, who did us the courtesy of scoring a budget. The president has to talk to Republicans when it comes to the debt ceiling. He has reached the debt ceiling before anyone expected.

  • Every time you cut programs, you take away a person who has a vested interest in high taxes and you put him on the tax rolls and make him a taxpayer. A farmer on subsidies is part welfare bum, whereas a free-market farmer is a small businessman with a gun.

  • Alexander Hamilton has been on the $10 since 1928, he's been well honored by the country, he was a great Secretary of the Treasury. But of all the people on the currency, the only one who isn't a president.

  • If the Republican Party works with the Hispanic community, the immigrant community, they're natural allies. People who came to this country are more freedom-loving and more American than people who just happened to be born here.

  • My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit. Because that person doesn't need the goddamn government for anything,

  • The RNC has made a concerted effort to work with their allies with a real focus on what we can do to equip candidates with the resources to win in 2014 and beyond. There isn't a week that goes by that I don't see someone from the RNC at our weekly coalition meeting. Keep up the good work.

  • People are an asset, not a liability. The United States is the most immigrant-friendly nation in the world and the richest country in the world. This is not a coincidence. Those voices that would make us less immigrant-friendly would make us less successful, less prosperous and certainly less American.

  • What Mae West said about sex is true about taxes. All tax cuts are good tax cuts; even bad tax cuts are good tax cuts.

  • Spending is not caring. Spending is what politicians do instead of caring. Spending more does not guarantee success. Politicians like to measure spending because it is easier than measuring actual metrics of accomplishment.

  • We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.

  • Obsessions turn people off.

  • It would be unwise for the modern Republican Party to come across as hostile to immigration. That has been the losing position in American history for 200 years.

  • The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party. People say, 'Oh, Grover Norquist has power.' No. Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform focus on the tax issue. The tax issue is a powerful issue.

  • I'm for tax reform, not tax increases.

  • Tax increases slow economic growth. Why would you raise taxes? We need to reform spending, the tens of trillions of unfunded liabilities can never be funded by tax increases, that can only be fixed by reducing spending.

  • There are several reasons to oppose tax increases. First, every dollar of tax increase is a dollar you didn't get in spending restraint. Two, if you walk into the Democrats' Andrews-Air-Force-Base, Lucy-with-the-Football trick for the third time in a row - they don't have have a saying for being fooled three times!

  • Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase.

  • Stupider than France is not where we want to be on tax policy.

  • I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

  • The problem is government spends too much. So raising taxes is what politicians do, instead of reducing spending.

  • As long as we're focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive.

  • The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That's what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government.

  • They tax when you earn a dollar, they tax you when you save it, they tax you when you invest it. If you earn a dividend, they tax it again, and if you're stupid enough to die, they steal up to half.

  • We have to have a conversation about whether Obama's plan to increase spending to occupy Afghanistan helps make America a safer country, or not. I think at some point, we may decide that we don't have to have that size military and cost footprint in the country. You look at what you want to accomplish, how many soldiers you need.

  • The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party.

  • The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don't want their taxes raised.

  • The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don't want their taxes raised. Obama and the Democrats have a fight with the American people, not with me.

  • I think it's very important to always make sure that you're talking to the entire coalition and to as many Americans as possible; not to go chasing after one little group or another. The Democrats would bring new groups into their party and not notice that larger groups are going out the back door.

  • My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.

  • Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.

  • Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith. And because the Democratic Party was taken over by the aggressive secular guys, they became hostile not just to conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, but Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Mormons.

  • People who are willing to stick to a strong pro-life position aren't going to be pushed off a strong anti-tax position. For people who like to think in ideologically cohesive ways, it makes no sense, but that's the way it is.

  • If the parties would brand themselves the way Coke and Pepsi and other products do so that you knew what you were buying, it had quality control. I vote for the Republican. He or she will not raise my taxes. I'll buy one. I'll take that one home.

  • The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform.

  • I'm not for no taxes. That would be an anarchist. I am for lower taxes.

  • We cannot allow anything that's called 'national defense' to justify any and all spending. We need to be very, very careful that we don't overspend and say, 'Oh, that's defense,' when perhaps it isn't.

  • We laugh at liberals who declare that their favorite spending programs should be exempt because the spending is for a noble cause.

  • This always confuses liberals, that conservatives like the military and don't like the bureaucracy. That's because the military has their guns pointed out and the bureaucracy has them pointed in.

  • Obama wants to take the individual small business tax to 44 percent, and the corporate rate - he says - down to 28 percent or whatever. But that really damages the small businesses. And it doesn't make us competitive. You got to take them both down to 20, because state and local corporate taxes are 5 percent.

  • Everyone would have bigger and safer cars if they didn't have those CAFE standards: corporate average fuel economy.

  • Our job is to make people free.

  • The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long.

  • There's no reason to raise taxes. Taxes should be lower... The problem we have is that government spends too much, not that taxes are too low.

  • All we have to do is replace Obama. ... We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. ... We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

  • Home schoolers do not wish to force other parents to home school. Gun owners do not insist that others buy guns, or that hunting be promoted as an alternative lifestyle. It is not the National Rifle Association out lobbying to have government schools read books entitled 'Heather Has Two Hunters' to preschoolers. It is, in fact, the Left that now strives to use state power to impose its morality by forcing all taxpayers to pay for abortions and public "art" that mocks people of faith. It is the Left that forces parents to pay for government schools where they do not wish to send their children.

  • I don't think Republicans will be fooled into taking this necessary spending and using it to oppose pro-growth tax cuts, using this tragedy and those deaths for his own political desires.

  • I read murder mysteries. I exercise 40 minutes a day. I watch videotapes while I exercise. I listen to audiotapes when I am in my car. And I try to stay in three different centuries.

  • It's the Democrats whose position is that the only problem in Washington, D.C., is the peasants aren't sending enough cash in for the king to spend.

  • No Republican could expect to win the GOP nod after betraying his party's rank and file.

  • Once the minority of House and Senate are comfortable in their minority status, they will have no problem socializing with the Republicans. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate. They are contented and cheerful. They don't go around peeing on the furniture and such.

  • One of the reasons some of the advocates of ever larger government and more government intrusiveness get nervous about discussions of the actual cost of government is that they fear if the people had a discussion about what government costs, the true cost of taxes, that they might not want as much government as they are presently getting.

  • Taxes are the killing fields of Democrats.

  • The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform,

  • The statists want to control the economy.

  • There are a number of people who won't be president in 2009, and Mark Warner is one of them.

  • We want [government] down to the size to where it would fit in a bathtub, and then it could worry about what we were up to.

  • We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.

  • When I became 21, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of 21.

  • We don't need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen.

  • The Democratic Party might be called the Takings Coalition, made up of groups that want the government to take from American citizens -- usually cash -- and keep it for itself.

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