John McCain Quotes

The Republicans have lost their standards; they've lost their principles... Really, that's why the machine in the Republican Party is fighting against me... They have never really gone along with lower taxes and less government.

Either we start cutting the government and shrinking the size of government, or else we're going to face the political wrath of the American people.

The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending - with the exception of the money spent on them.

I continue to vote against such spending increases, but sometimes I think some of my Republican colleagues forgot that we were sent here to shrink the federal government, not to grow it.

The time has come for us to draw the line. The time has come for the responsible leaders of both political parties to take a stand against overgrown Government and for the American taxpayer.

Restore, without delay, the equilibrium between revenue and expenditures, which has done so much to destroy our credit and derange the whole fabric of government. If that should not be done, the government and country will be involved, ere long, in overwhelming difficulties.

The federal government is far larger than the Founding Fathers ever intended it to be. We have racked up over $16 trillion of debt through wasteful spending, and it is time that we cut that waste and start reducing the size of our government.

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.

Our morbidly obese federal government needs not just behavior modification but bariatric surgery.

If you look at what is happening in Republican conventions across the country, they are energized. And the message is really the same - that is, big government is a problem, spending is a problem.

There are 100 different doors to come into the conservative movement. You can disagree with 99 of them, as long as you agree on one: more-limited government.

The only problem with Republican principles is no one's following them.

We should reduce total government spending as a percentage of the economy.

We have mountain of debt that isn't going away and all the problems are here to stay, and anybody who tells you that is a good thing ought to get out of the business of helping the government down the road.

'Hello my name is the Republican Party and I got a problem. I'm addicted to spending and big government.' I'd like one of them just to stand up and say that.

After 20 years in Congress, I still believe that smaller government and lower taxes are the most effective economic policies.

No one has yet succeeded in reducing the size or scope of the federal government.

Some politicians denounce government in order to capture the government and then they turn around and expand the government.

I don’t want to kill the government. I just want to shrink it down to a small enough size that I can flush it down the toilet.

Republicans are already on seriously thin ice, having presided over an era of unprecedented spending and consistently failing to articulate conservative principles on a wide variety of issues. But what Obama has in store will make President Bush appear, in retrospect, like a libertarian.

Bless his heart, I have respect for Mitt Romney, but I do not have respect for what he has done through this debt increase debate. He did this. He waited until it was a done deal that we would increase the debt ceiling, and more money would be spent, more money borrowed and then spent on bigger government. And then he came out and he made a statement, that he didn't like the deal after all. You know, you can't defer an issue and assume that the problem is going to be then avoided.

I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse and in a republican government more than in any other.

We need to know the facts, in order to tell the politicians, "Excuse me, I don't want you to use my money on building a wall that is not going to solve any problems. We have to go this direction instead."

Back in 2008, candidate Obama called a $10 trillion national debt 'unpatriotic' - serious talk from what looked to be a serious reformer. Yet by his own decisions, President Obama has added more debt than any other president before him, and more than all the troubled governments of Europe combined. One president, one term, $5 trillion in new debt.

The greatest threat to our national security is our debt. We borrow a million dollars a minute.