Wall Street Journal Quotes

It's often difficult for conservatives to separate overall government intervention from a question as simple as the census.

The phrase 'private option' itself has become politically toxic.

Paul Ryan says he's for smaller government, and he's funded every big government idea that there is.

There are things that I can agree with from both sides: perhaps the civil libertarian issues of the Left and also the economic freedom issues of the Right while still rejecting the big-government tendencies of both sides of the political spectrum.

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

We should distinguish carefully skepticism about Big Government from contempt for all government.

It's easier to sell cotton candy than it is to sell broccoli to somebody, but the broccoli is better for you, and the same thing with a limited government.

Just as the left has to be more willing to question 'Government knows best,' the right has to rethink its laissez-faire attitude toward government.

At the next General Election, voters face a clear choice: deregulation and less interference in everyday life with the Conservatives, or yet more regulation and interference under Mr Blair.

No American conservative has ever argued that the government should never be involved in peoples' lives. That is anarchy, and we don't argue for that.

MoveOn loves government. It remains enamored of government spending as fuel for its liberal agenda; and anything that threatens to close that spigot in any degree is perceived as a dire threat - worthy of Chicken-Little warnings that the sky is going to fall.

The problem is that the right doesn't need any ideas to govern, but the left can't govern without ideas.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

Liberals believe government should take people's earnings to give to poor people. Conservatives disagree. They think government should confiscate people's earnings and give them to farmers and insolvent banks.

I don’t want to eliminate government. I just want to shrink it down to the size that you can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the tub.

To use government interference as a weapon to try to enforce one’s personal moral standards on other people is wrong … I have never been able to understand how one could be a conservative and also say that government ought to be imposing itself into private decisions by consumers.

Somehow liberals have been unable to acquire from birth what conservatives seem to be endowed with at birth: namely, a healthy skepticism of the powers of government to do good.

In time the Democratic party will fade away and we will have a capitalistic party and a socialistic party.

The dilemma of modern progressive politics is that you are always fighting on two fronts: The conservatives on the right, and the conservatives on the left.

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.

People dislike government spending in the abstract, but the like government spending when they see the benefit.

When I am asked whether the division between the left and the right still has any meaning, the first thought that comes to my mind is that the person who asks the question is not on the left.

This difference between the two parties covers a wide range, and is indicative of the conservative thought of the one and the progressive thought of the other.

… the two factions (of the Republican Party) are at daggers drawn over government’s role, which one side sees as indispensable, the other as insidious..

But those who believe that what our people desire is big government are living in a state of delusion.