Grover Norquist quotes

Grover Norquist

"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."
Grover Norquist
People Government Free Want
"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."
Grover Norquist
Society Political Government City
"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."
Grover Norquist
People Government Sacrifice Job
"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."
Grover Norquist
People Government Care Will
"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."
Grover Norquist
You Time Farmer Gun
"I'm for tax reform, not tax increases."
Grover Norquist
Tax Reform Tax Reform Increases
"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."
Grover Norquist
Government Focus Disease Size
"Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub."
Grover Norquist
Government Drown Bathtub Size
"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."
Grover Norquist
Who Us Speech Talk
"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."
Grover Norquist
Day Car I Am Try
"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."
Grover Norquist
Happiness People Government Law
"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."
Grover Norquist
Politics You Time Practice
"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."
Grover Norquist
Education Money Government Name
"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."
Grover Norquist
Money Government Water Iceberg
"Obama is a guy who claims to be unaware that there was a Tea Party, a guy that's detached from the country."
Grover Norquist
Tea Country Who Guy
"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."
Grover Norquist
You Time Thinking Hot
"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."
Grover Norquist
You New Always Group
"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!"
Grover Norquist
Walk You Time Three
"Obsessions turn people off."
Grover Norquist
People Turn Off Obsessions
"Being married is kind of like being a Ken-doll; you don't get to dress yourself anymore."
Grover Norquist
You Yourself Dress Like
"The statists want to control the economy."
Grover Norquist
Control Want Economy
"My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit."
Grover Norquist
Ideal Guy Citizen Permit
"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."
Grover Norquist
Through Lawyers House Plan
"Wars are expensive and dangerous. They're not political winners."
Grover Norquist
Political Dangerous Winners Wars
"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."
Grover Norquist
Politics People Power Tea
"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."
Grover Norquist
You Home Quality Vote
"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."
Grover Norquist
Government Focus Us Economy
"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."
Grover Norquist
Long Government Grow Only
"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."
Grover Norquist
Who About House Position
"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."
Grover Norquist
Me People Fight American
"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."
Grover Norquist
Growth Time Slow Down
"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."
Grover Norquist
People Fight Government Group
"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."
Grover Norquist
You Business Taxes Us
"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."
Grover Norquist
Best Politics Alone Today
"When I was younger, I thought of myself as a Nixon Republican because he was the anti-Communist."
Grover Norquist
Myself Republican He Thought
"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."
Grover Norquist
Always Like Bureaucracy Military
"Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith."
Grover Norquist
Faith People Money Weird
"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."
Grover Norquist
People Community Country American
"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."
Grover Norquist
Government Path Focus Way
"The important thing about tax reform is you make the tax code less complicated, easier for people to understand."
Grover Norquist
You People Important About
"We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy."
Grover Norquist
Government Economy Government Spending
"A 20-pound weight on the back of a small horse is more damaging than a 20-pound weight on a very big horse."
Grover Norquist
Big Back More Horse
"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."
Grover Norquist
Government Taxes Reason Problem
"The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party."
Grover Norquist
Politics Tea American Back
"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."
Grover Norquist
Anything Cannot Need Say
"We need a Federal government that does what the government needs to do and stops doing what the government ought not to be doing."
Grover Norquist
Government Doing Need Needs
"Immigration is America's No. 1 economic asset. The rest of the world can't do that. We can have every smart person we want, every high-skilled person we want."
Grover Norquist
World Rest Smart America
"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."
Grover Norquist
Faith Leadership Business People
"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."
Grover Norquist
Future Looking Republican Lead

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