Great Throughts Treasury

"Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did."

"I believe we are now in a struggle over whether or not we are going to save America."

"I think one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around a campfire but are lousy in politics."

"In the middle of a recession no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated."

"It is time we passed a balanced budget amendment and return this government to limited spending."

"Part of why the Tea Party so deeply threatened the elite media is the tea party looked around and suddenly realized, there are more of us than there are of them."

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

"We tried to have diplomas without learning, we tried to have jobs without work, we tried to have houses without savings, we tried to have government without responsibility."

"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."

"You have to give the press confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate."

"You can't trust anybody with power. "

"The whole process is broken."

"All free people stand on Reagan's shoulders. His principled policies proved that free markets create wealth, that the rule of law sustains freedom, and that all people everywhere deserve the right to dream, to pursue their dreams, and to govern themselves."

"A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that's what freedom is all about."

"Abortion is a very, very important moral question and I think it?s a very important question about the very nature of society."

"According to the theory of the melting pot, if people had wanted to remain immersed in their old culture, they could have done so without coming to America."

"All I would say is, why did it take so long? The whole thing is strange. [about the release of President Obama?s long-form birth certificate]"

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

"America has never been a theocracy or a nation of saints. While God is central to our sense of national mission and destiny and personal faith is at the heart of the American experience, we have also been a nation of sinners and sin."

"America is a great country with good people living in it"

"American conservatism at its best has always been focused on individuals, families and communities, not government."

"America is about a dynamic, shifting, mobile world of opportunity where everyone has a chance to build a better mousetrap or bake a bigger pie. Group rights is a concept that fits a static world in which limited resources have to be carefully allocated by government."

"America is too big, too diverse, and too free to be run by bureaucrats sitting in office buildings in one city."

"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."

"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."

"And my point was one I think that you'd agree with, which is there's no room in America for a black racist, a Latino racist, or a white racist, or an Asian racist, or a Native American racist. Now, we're either color blind or we're not color blind."

"But I think all of us would also agree that there's a very central part of your faith in how you approach public life. And I, frankly, would be really worried if somebody assured me that nothing in their faith would affect their judgments, because then I'd wonder, where's your judgment ? how can you have judgment if you have no faith? And how can I trust you with power if you don't pray? Who you pray to, how you pray, how you come close to God is between you and God. But the notion that you're endowed by your creator sets a certain boundary on what we mean by America."

"And I would say to my friends on the left who believe that there's never been a government program that wasn't worth keeping, you can't look at some of the results we now have and not want to reach out to the humans and forget the bureaucracies."

"By blaming everything on society, contemporary liberals are really trying to escape the personal responsibility that comes with being an American."

"As a historian I understand how histories are written. My enemies will write histories that dismiss me and prove I was unimportant. My friends will write histories that glorify me and prove I was more important than I was. And two generations or three from now, some serious sober historian will write a history that sort of implies I was whoever I was."

"Fannie Mae is an excellent example of a former government institution fulfilling its mandate while functioning in the market economy."

"Democrats will bring to the United States the joys of Soviet-style brutality and the murder of women and children."

"For 35 years the political and intellectual elite's of political correctness have undermined the coral values of American history so our young people may not know who George Washington is or they may not know who Abraham Lincoln is, but they do know what MTV is, and that is not progress, that is decadence, and we should say it bluntly."

"Describing Medicare - Now, we don?t get rid of it in round one because we don?t think that that?s politically smart, and we don?t think that?s the right way to go through a transition. But we believe it?s going to wither on the vine because we think people are voluntarily going to leave it, voluntarily."

"For two generations, we have raised the taxes on working families so that the second spouse has no choice but to go to work almost entirely to pay the families taxes. And then we talk about latchkey kids when it is the very liberal politicians that raise the taxes who created the latchkey."

"Frankly, Governor Romney in his career has created more jobs than the entire Obama cabinet combined, so he could actually talk about it."

"Generally, liberals neither understand nor believe in the constitutional right to bear arms."

"Gingrich primary mission: Advocate of civilization, definer of civilization, teacher of the rules of civilization, leader of the civilizing forces. [describing himself]"

"Give the park police more ammo."

"GRETA VAN SUSTEREN: What would you do about Libya? GINGRICH: Exercise a no-fly zone this evening, communicate to the Libyan military that Gaddafi was gone and that the sooner they switch sides, the more likely they were to survive, provided help to the rebels to replace him. I mean, the idea that we're confused about a man who has been an anti-American dictator since 1969 just tells you how inept this administration is. They were very quick to jump on Mubarak, who was their ally for 30 years, and they were confused about getting rid of Gaddafi. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with."

"Go get a job after you take a bath. [about Occupy Wall Street protesters]"

"Group rights trap us within our own group. Each association is measured by genes rather than compatibility. Group rights would constitute America into a seething band of competing legally defined groups maneuvering against one another for governmentally imposed special privileges."

"Have you heard a single national figure tell you all of the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?"

"How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

"I am a Theodore Roosevelt Republican. I believe in free markets within a regulatory environment. So I like having McDonald's and Wendy's compete, but I want the water to be drinkable and the hamburger to be beef. And I'm prepared to sanction the government to ensure that."

"I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."

"Hope lies, as it always has, in the American people."

"I assume that somewhere after he attacked Arizona; engaged in what I think was a racist dialogue to try to frighten Latinos away from the Republican Party; stood next to the president of Mexico and said, "Borders don't matter because we have strong bonds"; had the President of Mexico get a standing ovation from Democrats for attacking an American state, and has his own State Department apologize to the Chinese for the Arizona law."

"I believe the kids could mop the floor and clean up the bathroom and get paid for it and it would be OK."

"I believe we will elect a new President in 2012."