Grover Norquist Quotes

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Grover Norquist

Profession : Politician

Birth : October 19, 1956

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

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.

Grover Norquist

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

Grover Norquist

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

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

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.

Grover Norquist

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

Grover Norquist

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.

Grover Norquist

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

Obsessions turn people off.

Grover Norquist

Our job is to make people free.

Grover Norquist

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

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.

Grover Norquist

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.

Grover Norquist

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

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

The statists want to control the economy.

Grover Norquist

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

Grover Norquist

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

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