Karl Rove Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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. It's easy to point at me. I'm convenient."

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

"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."

"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 world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone."

"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."

"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 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."

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"You all had something to do with keeping me employed."

"We've been probably to some degree too successful."

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