Barry Goldwater Quotes

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

My father was an ex-Marine Goldwater Republican.

They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that's what happened.

I like to say I'm more conservative than Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax.

I have been a Republican since 1966.

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known - Nominee Barry Goldwater.

He was a superb military officer but he was also an extraordinarily gifted politician. That he was an unusually open, honest and no-nonsense politician did not make him unsuited for the profession, only uncommon. In uniform and in politics Barry's purpose was always the defense of freedom. And nobody before or since managed the task more ably or more colorfully than Barry Goldwater.

I think Bernie's [Sanders] setting a direction in the way that [Barry] Goldwater when he lost - I'm not saying he's going to lose. We don't know what is going to happen. It's early. But I think he's already set a lot of themes.

Barry Goldwater has definitely decided to be a candidate in '64. He will campaign in all thirteen states.

[Barry] Goldwater wants to repeal the present and veto the future.

In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.

In the 1960s, as a rising defense intellectual, Kissinger was a Nelson Rockefeller man, firmly entrenched in the center-right establishment. When he attended the infamous 1964 Republican convention in San Francisco, he was horrified by Goldwater supporters, whom he likened to fascists.

I'm a conservative Republican. I have been since I was 15 years old and participated in the 'Goldwater for President' campaign in 1964.

Republicans think that [Ted] Cruz would be like Barry Goldwater. He'd lose in a landslide and pull the party down with him. They'd lose Senate and House seats.

Conservatives have always been forthright about our views, whether they brought defeat in 1964 or victory in 1980.

I am a Libertarian Republican in the Goldwater style.

Following the pattern of right-wing philosophizing, he [Barry Goldwater] proves his points by quoting 18th-Century Americans, 19th-Century Englishmen, and 20th-Century Communists.

Goldwater and his crowd tell me that they’ll forgive you for anything except being weak.