Top 45 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The statists want to control the economy.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 20-pound weight on the back of a small horse is more damaging than a 20-pound weight on a very big horse.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Less government, less regulation, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.