Top 100 Norquist Quotes
#1. When Grover Norquist launched his project to name anything and everything after Ronald Reagan, I humbly proposed that the deficit be re-christened 'the Reagan.'
Timothy Noah
#2. I always thought that Grover Norquist had a - he really is a true ideologue, in every sense of the word.
Nina Easton
#3. Whether it's their Sharia law and birther conspiracies or their unwillingness to buck Grover Norquist's no-tax pledge, the Tea Partiers have hijacked their party and carried it all the way to the right.
Jennifer Granholm
#4. The rigidity of those pledges is something I don't like. The circumstances change and you can't be wedded to some formula by Grover Norquist. It's - who the hell is Grover Norquist, anyway?
George H. W. Bush
#5. I think we ought to call (Republicans who sign the Norquist no tax pledge) exactly what they are - they are traitors and they don't deserve to hold elective office in this country.
Bill Press
#6. I admire Grover Norquist. I think he's done a lot of good.
Tom Cole
#7. Anti-Tax fetishist Grover Norquist owns a bust of Ronald Reagan, who raised taxes 11 times.
John Fugelsang
#8. Grover Norquist is a mean-spirited, humorless, dishonest little creep ... an embarrassing anomaly, the leering, drunken uncle everyone else wishes would stay home ... [He] is repulsive, granted, but there aren't nearly enough of him to start a purge trial.
Tucker Carlson
#9. The taxpayer group in every state is always - always referred to as nuts.
Grover Norquist
#10. I was an anti-communist before I was political in other ways.
Grover Norquist
#11. Which idiot put the GOP convention the same time as 'Burning Man' in Nevada? Is there time to change this?
Grover Norquist
#12. 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
#13. 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.
Grover Norquist
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. If you raise taxes, it won't reduce the deficit. The other team will simply spend the resources.
Grover Norquist
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy.
Grover Norquist
#26. 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.
Grover Norquist
#27. Income should be taxed one time at one rate, not again and again.
Grover Norquist
#28. Cities are for people. A city is where people come to work and raise their families and to spend their money and to walk in the evening. It is not a traffic corridor.
John Norquist
#29. 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
#30. 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.
Grover Norquist
#31. 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.
Grover Norquist
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Grover Norquist
#34. 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
#35. I'm not for no taxes. That would be an anarchist. I am for lower taxes.
Grover Norquist
#36. No Republican could expect to win the GOP nod after betraying his party's rank and file.
Grover Norquist
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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.
Grover Norquist
#40. 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
#41. The central issue of our time - of all times - is the size, power and scope of government.
Grover Norquist
#42. The important thing about tax reform is you make the tax code less complicated, easier for people to understand.
Grover Norquist
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#47. I was a math guy as a kid. I was really good at math. I wasn't particularly interested in it.
Grover Norquist
#48. The highway program devalues the tax base of a city.
John Norquist
#49. 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
#50. We will make it so that a Democrat cannot govern as a Democrat.
Grover Norquist
#51. People learn their politics at a young age and tend to stick with it.
Grover Norquist
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Most Republicans have made it very clear they're not interested in raising taxes. They want to reform government.
Grover Norquist
#60. 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.
Grover Norquist
#61. Compromise is moving in the right directlon more slowly than one might like.
Grover Norquist
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. We laugh at liberals who declare that their favorite spending programs should be exempt because the spending is for a noble cause.
Grover Norquist
#66. The tax issue is the most powerful issue in American politics going back to the Tea Party.
Grover Norquist
#67. 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
#68. People who say that there's a vote within the Republican Party that moves against immigrants is just factually not accurate.
Grover Norquist
#69. When I was younger, I thought of myself as a Nixon Republican because he was the anti-Communist.
Grover Norquist
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. The Republican Party and the conservative free market movement have been presidentially focused for too long.
Grover Norquist
#73. 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
#74. Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.
Grover Norquist
#75. 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
#76. Being married is kind of like being a Ken-doll; you don't get to dress yourself anymore.
Grover Norquist
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. There are a number of people who won't be president in 2009, and Mark Warner is one of them.
Grover Norquist
#80. The problem is government spends too much. So raising taxes is what politicians do, instead of reducing spending.
Grover Norquist
#81. The American taxpayers are a powerful force. They don't want their taxes raised.
Grover Norquist
#82. Stupider than France is not where we want to be on tax policy.
Grover Norquist
#83. When I became 21, I decided that nobody learned anything about politics after the age of 21.
Grover Norquist
#84. Not continuing a tax cut is not technically a tax increase.
Grover Norquist
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. My ideal citizen is the self-employed, homeschooling, IRA-owning guy with a concealed-carry permit.
Grover Norquist
#88. 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
#89. We are trying to change the tones in the state capitals - and turn them toward bitter nastiness and partisanship.
Grover Norquist
#90. Everyone would have bigger and safer cars if they didn't have those CAFE standards: corporate average fuel economy.
Grover Norquist
#91. Wars are expensive and dangerous. They're not political winners.
Grover Norquist
#92. 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
#93. Historically, opposition to immigration in the United States has been racially and religiously motivated in the ugliest, nastiest way possible.
Grover Norquist
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Highways dont belong in cities. Period. Europe didnt do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price.
John Norquist
#100. We don't need someone who can think. We need someone with enough digits to hold a pen.
Grover Norquist
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
