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.

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.

Our goal is to shrink government to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub.

Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The question is: How do we reduce spending from 25% of GDP, which is where Obama put us? The focus is on total government spending. Can we bring it down, in a reasonable and politically acceptable way? That's what the Paul Ryan plan does. It puts us on a gradual reform path to reducing the size of government.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Income should be taxed one time at one rate, not again and again.

Democrats are people who raise your taxes and spend your money on weird stuff. They steal your guns, and they spit on your faith. And because the Democratic Party was taken over by the aggressive secular guys, they became hostile not just to conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians, but Orthodox Jews and Muslims and Mormons.

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.

The future of the Republican Party, all the different folks looking to lead the Republican Party at the national level in the future, recognize we should do immigration reform.

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.

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.

There are several reasons to oppose tax increases. First, every dollar of tax increase is a dollar you didn't get in spending restraint. Two, if you walk into the Democrats' Andrews-Air-Force-Base, Lucy-with-the-Football trick for the third time in a row - they don't have have a saying for being fooled three times!

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

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.

Compromise is moving in the right directlon more slowly than one might like.

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

As long as we're focused on spending, there are only two ways to do that: One is spend less, and Democrats have no solutions for that. Or we have pro-growth policies that make the economy grow so the dead-weight cost of government becomes a smaller percentage of the economy and therefore less expensive.

I know the activists I deal with, we sort of try and check each other to make sure that we haven't gone native, that you come to Washington thinking it's a cesspool, you don't want to end up thinking it's really a hot tub and getting used to it. So that's something one has to keep an eye on all the time.

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

I'm for tax reform, not tax increases.

We have to have a conversation about whether Obama's plan to increase spending to occupy Afghanistan helps make America a safer country, or not. I think at some point, we may decide that we don't have to have that size military and cost footprint in the country. You look at what you want to accomplish, how many soldiers you need.

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.

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.

Obsessions turn people off.

Being married is kind of like being a Ken-doll; you don't get to dress yourself anymore.

The statists want to control the economy.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy. The left wants to focus on the deficit so they can take us away from the focus on spending as a percentage of the economy.

Twenty-five years ago, I created the Taxpayer Protection Pledge at the federal level. Then I brought it to the state and local level. About 97 percent of the Republicans in the House and 85 percent in the Senate have signed on, and the number of candidates who have taken the pledge is even higher. It's become a party position.

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.

Well, certainly the Democrats have been arguing to raise the capital gains tax on all Americans. Obama says he wants to do that. That would slow down economic growth. It's not necessarily helpful to the economy. Every time we've cut the capital gains tax, the economy has grown. Whenever we raise the capital gains tax, it's been damaged.

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.