Grover Norquist Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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.

- 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

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

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.

- Grover Norquist

Compromise is moving in the right directlon more slowly than one might like.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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.

- 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

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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.

- Grover Norquist

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.

- 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

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

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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

I'm for tax reform, not tax increases.

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

- 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

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.

- 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

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

- Grover Norquist

If you let people own their land, they take care of it. That's why privately owned land is always taken care of, and the parks look like cesspools. Nobody takes care of what everybody owns.

- 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

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

- Grover Norquist

Less government, less regulation, lower taxes.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

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.

- Grover Norquist

If you're so committed to liberty that you see the Soviet Union as a threat, you're a Republican. If you're kind of indifferent to freedom and the level of the lack of freedom in the Soviet Union is just a question of extent and not really threatening to anybody, then you're a Democrat.

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

People who say that there's a vote within the Republican Party that moves against immigrants is just factually not accurate.

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

My goal in life is to get the federal government down to half its present size and under control, and then I can write murder mysteries.

- Grover Norquist

The taxpayer group in every state is always - always referred to as nuts.

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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.

- Grover Norquist

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

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

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

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

- Grover Norquist

When I was younger, I thought of myself as a Nixon Republican because he was the anti-Communist.

- 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

The statists want to control the economy.

- Grover Norquist