Karl Rove Quotations

'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

Memo to White House: Calling voters stupid is not a winning strategy.

I think it's dawning on some Democrats that obstructing the Patriot Act, like they've been obstructing everything else, is bad for them politically.

Ronald Reagan wasn't in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.

In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.

The Tea Party movement is a wide and diverse group. It will hurt the Republican Party if some elements of the Tea Party decide to become third party advocates because it will split the conservative vote.

Crossroads is second to none in our support of Tea Party candidates. In 2010 and '12, we spent over $30 million for Senate candidates who were Tea Party candidates. We spent almost $20 million for House candidates who were Tea Party candidates.

Somebody gets to be smart and somebody gets to be dumb. If we win, it'll be because of the president. And if we lose, it'll be because of me.

The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.

And I think there's something about conservatives frankly - and the Left, when it comes to their channels of persuasion, are unpersuasive. They are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

I would have strong opinions and be prepared to argue my case, but if you talk to my colleagues, I think you'd find they consider me the jokester, the informal mayor of the West Wing.

Alinsky's 1971 book, 'Rules for Radicals,' is a favorite of the Obamas. Michele Obama quoted it at the Democratic Convention. One Alinsky tactic is to 'Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.' That's what the White House did in targeting Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer.

But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about.

Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.

I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things.

I'll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can't go back in life. I won't go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way.

I know enough about European politics to know you've got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.

For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush.

Our competition for American business is no longer in the next county or the next state, it's around the world.

I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence.

In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect.

And not only that, I also have the MacBook Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.

Life is rough for a lot of people. Some people live in greater material circumstances than others, but life is rough for everybody.

Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.

The fallback position in politics is if you don't know what you want to be about, and if you don't know what your vision is, go at somebody else.

We've been probably to some degree too successful.

Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real antiwar movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an antiwar rally.

I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years.

I supported Pat Toomey when he ran in 2010. I gave him money in September of 2009 because I wanted him to be the U.S. senator. I personally contributed my own money.

I think wealthy conservatives are busy investing in profit and job creation and enterprise, and wealthy liberals, many of them either from the media industry themselves or from - they recognize the value of communications and are more ready to put money into a less profitable enterprise, namely the media.

If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.

Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25 percent while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives.

My parents, particularly my father, had been used by commentators, political journalists and political commentators, to attack me, and the collateral damage was the reputations of my father and my mother.

Remember the Tea Party movement didn't get started in September of 2008 when the bank bailout was passed. It really began on Feb. 19th, 2009 when a television commentator named Rick Santelli stood up and said what the hell are we doing bailing out people who couldn't afford a mortgage by taking money from people like me who are prudent?

The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.

The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead - higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.

Well, marriage is a very important part of our culture and our society. If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal.

If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.

I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.

You all had something to do with keeping me employed.

At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views of the world.

I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.

I've been booed on stages. I'm a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.

It's not comfortable for me to write about my family. I'm not comfortable writing about me.

Look, there ought to be politics in politics.

Well, I don't want to become a prognosticator.

Well, I'm a Christian. I was a born a Presbyterian and became an Episcopalian.

What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn't really 'empathy' and 'understanding.' He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice.

You may be right that people say: 'You know what, we had Obama. He was inexperienced. The guy had great rhetoric, sounded good, looked good, but has turned out to be an utter disaster. I want someone where I have confidence and credibility that they're up to the job and that I can trust what they tell me.'

You need to look at Congress as having a certain capacity. Now, the capacity varies from year to year and from body to body, but there is a finite amount of things that Congress can attentively do.

The outcome of that debate will shape the course of human events,

We strongly support Tom DeLay. He's a good man, a close ally of this administration.

We're going to have to use every diplomatic tool with the United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency and our partners in Europe to bring pressure to bear to stop this.

Yes, look, there are some hurdles, regulatory hurdles, that this still needs to go through on the British side as well that are going to be concluded next week. There's no requirement that it close, you know, immediately after that.

This prosecutor may have new information that may contradict prior testimony or may have questions about prior testimony, may simply seek a clarification. I'm not going to try to speculate what the motivation is behind Mr. Fitzgerald in asking a return by any witness. But there are a variety of reasons that someone might be called back to answer additional questions before a grand jury.

Look, what really matters is how people are going to see his policies over the long haul. Over the long haul, they are going to see this administration as one that is committed to using new technology and new innovative approaches to clean the air, clean the water and clean the land.

Sit down -- you'll get your dinner quicker,

She is the dominant player on their side of the slate. Anybody who thinks that she's not going to be the candidate is kidding themselves.

Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as 'deficits as far as the eye can see.' But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

I would remind you that in 1984, after the Mondale -- second Mondale-Reagan debate -- where Reagan clearly won, the instant polls showed that Mondale was the winner.

If this is going to be ongoing, if he has a problem, I think he's got to step up, and, you know, acknowledge that and deal with it.

I disagree. The Age of Bush 43 did not cause the polarization.

I am going to have a great Friday and a fantastic weekend and hope you do too.

Bush and Cheney will be going to the same groups of states, going to the same kinds of markets, just at different times, ... It's far more powerful to us to have him go to the battleground states. It's far more powerful to have him focused on the same mission as George W. Bush--that is, laying out a positive and optimistic agenda.

From a lot of places in New Jersey you could see the towers,

He tried to psyche the governor out. And it didn't work.

He increased his popular vote total by 11.6 million votes since 2000. That's four-and-a-half times the increase that President Clinton got between '92 and '96.

He (Gore) attacked Governor Bush as being unworthy of being president for having some of the same views that he now compliments his running mate for having. I guess it's risky if you are a Republican to have those views, but it's courageous if you are Joe Lieberman,

We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America.

The purpose of the terrorist-surveillance program is to protect lives. The president's actions were legal and fully consistent with the 4th Amendment and the protection of our civil liberties under the constitution.

Here in America, we have become too dependent -- too dependent -- on the increasingly limited supply of foreign oil for our own energy needs.

He's doing a good job. Those who criticize him should reconsider. He's my friend and is trusted by me and the president.

His proposal is that if schools in the inner cities receiving federal money fail to do the job after three years, the money follows the job, ... Meet the Press.

I think the American people won by having a good opportunity to gauge these two men and they especially walked with a firm relocation of what they thought so highly of Dick Cheney during the Gulf War ... He was clearly in command tonight.

It is a relationship of respect. Clinton liked to mine us for money, but we have accomplished more with this administration than we ever did with Clinton.

People are going to see the candidate as he or she is at the end of the parade,

Our interest is in making certain the members of Congress have full information about it, and that, we're convinced, will give them a level of comfort with this.

Our arguments will carry the day because the force and logic and wisdom of the Founders are on our side.

Republicans have a post-9/11 view of the world. And Democrats have a pre-9/11 view of the world. That doesn't make them unpatriotic, not at all. But it does make them wrong - deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong.

Reporters now see their role less as discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth and more as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power, whether they are Republican or Democrat.

remains a focus of the CIA leak probe. He has told friends it is possible he still will be indicted for providing false statements to the grand jury.

Our party will win (in November) because we have an agenda to run on and that Americans agree on.

People have raised an issue about security. That is entirely appropriate. But upon examination, it's not the company that's in charge of security, it's the United States' government that's in charge of security.

We intend to pick it up. I welcome this debate because it is one that we can win.

will not prejudge the investigation based on media reports.

will not call into question the accuracy or completeness of anything Rove has previously said to the prosecutor or the grand jury.

Well, it was pretty straightforward and pretty plain. He told the president, 'I will make certain your nominees receive a hearing, I'll make certain that they receive a vote, and the appellate nominees will be brought to the floor.'

Who would have thought that the powerful members of the world's most exclusive club would be so threatened by a movement of competent, principle-driven egghead lawyers?

To retreat before victory has been won would be a reckless act, and this president and our party will not allow it.

The president was the clear, commanding victor tonight, ... It's going to give us a great momentum rolling out on the trail here for the last 19 days.

We need to change the tone in Washington,

We are engaged in a diplomatic process with our European partners and the United Nations to keep them from developing such a weapon.

The GOP's progress during the last four decades is a stunning political achievement. But it is also a cautionary tale of what happens to a dominant party - in this case, the Democrat Party - when its thinking becomes ossified; when its energy begins to drain; when an entitlement mentality takes over; and when political power becomes an end in itself rather than a mean to achieve the common goal.

What is important is that members of Congress have the time to get fully briefed on this. We intend to work closely with them in order to give them a comfort level on this.

The problem for us in this election is an embarrassment of riches.

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers, Democrats Demand Rove Apologize for 9/11 Remarks.