Newt Gingrich Quotes

Bowing to the Saudi king is not an energy policy.

The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia,

If you get involved in a controversy, then that becomes the mesmerizing event that people remember you by.

We have big ideas. I just think that's part of how you campaign. You talk to the American people about big things.

You have a very poor neighborhood. You have students that are required to go to school. They have no money, no habit of work. What if you paid them in the afternoon to work in the clerical office or as the assistant librarian?

What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.

I can tell you I can work on four or five hours of sleep a night and cat nap all day, and I can go for 8 or 10 days on the road, and it doesn't seem to affect me.

Trump would represent turmoil - unless he changed, unless he said, 'Now that I got to be president, I'm gonna be normal.'

Without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan, without Ronald Reagan there would probably still be a Soviet Union.

Is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of people and then walk off with the money?

Opposing taxes is a key conservative value.

I had a period of thinking that I would have been called 'Newt the McPherson,' as in 'Robert the Bruce.'

1995 government shutdown from GOP underestimating Clinton.

I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it. I am now a famous person. I represent real power.

An energy tax punishes senior citizens, it punishes rural Americans, if you use electricity it punishes you. This bill will increase your cost of living and may kill your job.

It's going to be a bummer if Mars turns out to be like us.

It is perfectly American to be wrong.

I think every religious person should have a deep sense of respect for other people's religious documents and religious symbols just as we were deeply opposed to the Taliban destroying the two historic buddhas which they blew up. So I think we ought to all oppose burning the Koran.

I am for deporting all recent unattached illegals. I am for a local citizen panel to consider certification of those who have been here 25 years and have family and community and have been law-abiding and tax-paying.

As [House] speaker, I came back, working with President Bill Clinton. We passed a very Reagan-like program: less regulation, lower taxes. Unemployment dropped to 4.2 percent. We created 11 million jobs.

You can either be in the Ron Paul tradition and say there's nothing wrong with heroin and cocaine, or you can be in the tradition that says, 'These kind of addictive drugs are terrible; they deprive you of full citizenship, and they lead you to a dependency which is antithetical to being an American.'

I think to close half of Magic Kingdom for the purpose of a White House invitation town hall meeting on a phony main street on behalf of a phony president just strikes me as weird.

To the degree I was too brash, Too self-confident or too pushy, I apologize.

Personal responsibility extends to the purchase of health insurance. Citizens should not be able to cheat their neighbors by not buying insurance, particularly when they can afford it, and expect others to pay for their care when they need it.

Christmas represents love and mercy. It was ushered in by the star of hope and remains forever consecrated by the sacrifice of the cross. Christmas holds its place in the hearts of men because they know that love is the greatest thing in the world. Christmas is celebrated in the true spirit only by those who make some sacrifice for the benefit of their fellow men.

I pray before virtually every speech and virtually every major decision.

By definition, the person who learns enough to become the nominee is almost certainly the best person for the general election.

The evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon loading of the atmosphere.

Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney? The fact is, you ran in '94 and lost. That's why you weren't serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad re-election rating, you dropped out of office, you had been out of state for something like 200 days preparing to run for president. You didn't have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor.

I think what you'll find is overall, overwhelmingly, evangelicals would prefer me to Barack Obama.

We are going to have the candidate of food stamps, the finest food-stamp president in the American history, in Barack Obama, and we are going to have a candidate of paychecks.

If you're not in 'The Washington Post' every day, you might as well not exist.

We have to be as militant defending America as the enemies of America are in trying to destroy America.

We don't we agree that litigation reform to lower the cost of healthcare would be a good starting point?

All unemployment compensation should be tied to a job training requirement. Now the fact is, 99 weeks is an associate degree.

Support charters; insist on change for failing schools.

The most important social welfare program in America is a job.

Defeating Barack Obama becomes, in fact, a duty of national security. Because the fact is, he is incapable of defending the United States.

The ACLU is an organization with a long and distinguished history of fighting to protect freedom of speech. On the other hand, in recent years, it has carried its mandate to ever more eccentric and often highly destructive lengths. While is may have been perfectly honorable for Dukakis to belong to the ACLU, it was equally legitimate for Bush to attack him for it. And with what enormous relish he did the job!

I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps.

You can never study Franklin Delano Roosevelt too much.

The government shut down 12 times under Democratic House Speaker Tip O'Neill. It was only shut down twice while I was speaker.

If you go to the Lincoln Memorial, the Second Inaugural is probably the most religious speech ever given by an American President. In its 732 words, it references God 14 times and has two verses of the Bible.

I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress.

If, as the popular saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, the people who run our public schools fit that description.

We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.

It's been one of the most painful things I've ever been through in my whole life: trying to understand the degree to which behaviors that I thought were totally appropriate were destructive.

What more do I need to say? Conservative books sell. I can't help it if liberal books don't sell.

A good officer learned to take care of the feet of his men first, and from there their stomachs and hearts. By that means, he could motivate their souls.

Being Americans, we prosecute wars to win them, not to have reasonable response, not to have appropriate levels of retaliation. Our theory is you start bombing our cities; we're going to defeat you and make it impossible.

The terrorism danger to the United States is even worse than September 11th, when 19 hijackers murdered almost 3,000 Americans.

I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count.

Now you have to ask a question - is that really, is capitalism really about the ability of a handful of rich people to manipulate the lives of thousands of other people and walk off with the money? Or is that in fact somehow a little bit of a flawed system? And so I do draw distinction between looting a company, leaving behind broken families and broken neighborhoods and then leaving a factory that should be there.

[The Republicans] offer ... a detailed agenda for national renewal ... [On] reducing illegitimacy ... the state will use ... funds for programs to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies, to promote adoption, to establish and operate children's group homes, to establish and operate residential group homes for unwed mothers, or for any purpose the state deems appropriate. None of the taxpayer funds may be used for abortion services or abortion counseling.

Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

I don't think we have conclusive proof that humans are at the center of [global warming]

We have to frankly break the back of the secular-socialist machine, elect people committed to representing the American people, and then methodically rip the system apart.

Iran - the world's leading sponsor of terrorism - is close to having nuclear weapons.

I don't understand why they call it public broadcasting. As far as I am concerned, there's nothing public about it; it's an elitist enterprise. 'Rush Limbaugh' is public broadcasting.

So when people tell you, oh, you can't have the Ten Commandments on public property, they're just wrong. It's historically false. It's not true. Now, you can decide to invent a new America in which you shouldn't say "one nation under God" as part of the pledge because, after all, you will offend three atheists. But that's not the America you inherited. That's a different country. And I think it's a weaker country and I think it's a country that has no roots in terms of where its rights come from.

The U.S. cannot be the policeman of the world. When we tried that in Vietnam, they beat us up.

NEA includes most bizarre & extreme misuse of tax funds.

You've got the North Koreans building weapons; you got the Iranians building weapons. You've got - the Pakistanis already have at least 100 nuclear weapons. Do you think there's any serious effort in this country to come to grips with that?

The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.

We have a choice between those who are failing to deliver and those who are unthinkable ... Neither party currently is where the country is.

The secular elites are so terrified of telling the truth about radical Islam. When you talk about the radical Islamists, we have got to get straight and get serious and talk about it in the right way.

I want to say unequivocally that while I cherish every person who comes from anywhere, who comes here legally and seeks to pursue happiness, and I hope all of them decide to stay and become American citizens, but I want them to become American. And part of becoming American involved English. It is vital historically to assert and establish that English is the common language at the heart of our civilization.

The Congress is pretty powerful if it wants to be.

Think about it. If it's taking pictures, it's not a cellphone. If it has a McDonald's app to tell you where McDonald's is based on your GPS location, that's not a cellphone. If you can get Wikipedia or go to Google, that's not a cellphone.

I got active in this business of politics and self-government in 1958 when my father, who was serving in the U.S. Army, took us to the battlefield of Verdun.

Established systems are inherently hostile to change.

People have to render judgment. In my case, I've said upfront openly, I've made mistakes at times. I've had to go to God for forgiveness. I've had to seek reconciliation. But I'm also a 68-year-old grandfather, and I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I'm a person they can trust.

The America in which we grew up is vastly different from the America the secular-socialist Left want to create. And that's why saving America is the fundamental challenge of our time. The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.

Do you men still know how to fight?" he (GW) roared.
A primal cry erupted around him.
"Then fall in and show those redcoats over there" - he pointed back to the advancing British - "how Americans can stand and fight for their freedom!

Private scholarships for students at hopeless schools.

See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral. Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn't change, only the morality ... That's why you get to go to jail and I don't.

As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20% of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90% of the time.

There is no question that at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about my country, that I worked far too hard and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate.

If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles.

We used to be a serious country. When we got attacked at Pearl Harbor, we took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. We beat all three in less than four years. We're about to enter the seventh year of this phony war against ... [terrorist groups], and we're losing.

President Obama is a president so weak that he makes Jimmy Carter look strong.

I was attacked the other night for being grandiose. I would just want you to note: Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose and that Americans are instinctively grandiose,

I balanced the budget for four straight years, paid off $405 billion in debt - pretty conservative. The first entitlement reform of your lifetime - in fact, the only major entitlement reform to now is welfare.

It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid ... These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school.

It was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003. We have to pull back, and we have to recognize it.

The genius of guys like Lincoln and Reagan and FDR - the great communicator leaders - is that they're actually educators, so they understand when they use a phrase that they have to explain it, because, by definition, you won't understand it or they wouldn't need to be using it.

And by the way I don't object if people want to attack me, that's their right. All I'm suggesting that it's not going to be very effective and that people are going to get sick of it very fast. And the guys who attacked each other in the debates up to now, every single one of them have lost ground by attacking.

Is the purpose of free elections to allow the most clever and vicious person to aggregate power, or is the purpose of free elections to enable the American people to have a serious conversation about their country's future and try to find both a policy and a personality that they think will carry to them that better future?

Indicate which principles you support regarding affirmative action and discrimination. 1. The federal government should discontinue affirmative action programs. 2. The federal government should prosecute cases of discrimination in the public sector. 3. The federal government should prosecute cases of discrimination in the private sector.

What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority. If voters care about parking lots, then talk about parking lots.

Governor Romney may be running for CEO, I'm running for President

The greatest leaders in fighting for an integrated America in the twentieth century were in the Democratic Party. The fact is, it was the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that ended segregation. The fact is that it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who gave hope to a nation that was in despair and could have slid into dictatorship. And the fact is, every Republican has much to learn from studying what the Democrats did right.

That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior ... I think Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality ... If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.

You talk about crying! The spring of 1988, I spent a fair length of time trying to come to grips with who I was and the habits I had and what they did to people that I truly loved. I really spent a period of time where, I suspect, I cried three or four times a week.

Surely the President can agree with us, that theft from government is not good. I know it's bold. It's out on the edge. I know from a Chicago-Springfield background it's hard to fully grasp that honesty could be part of government.

Nixon had this remarkably effective, deeply intense will to power. Reagan and I have a will to ideas.

Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire's challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail ... President Reagan is clearly failing.

I'm against ObamaCare, which is imposing radical change, and I would be against a conservative imposing radical change ... I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering ... I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate.

My style is to stay on the offensive: to take risks, to recover very fast when you make a mistake, but to keep moving forward.