Republican Party (United States)

When the chips are down and the decisions are made as to who the candidates will be, then the 11th commandment prevails and everybody goes to work, and that is: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican. ~ Ronald Reagan

The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party.

Quotes

• You know your party's in trouble when you read this: A: The rape guy lost. B: Which one?
  • Alec Baldwin, Twitter, 2012-11-06[1]
  • Referring to multiple Republican candidates, including Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, receiving negative publicity for their public statements about rape.
  • Frequently paraphrased as: You know your party is in trouble when people ask, "Did the rape guy win?", and you have to ask, "Which one?"

• The Republican Party is experiencing an existential crisis, born of its own misguided incongruity with modern American culture and its insistence on choosing intransigence in a dynamic age of fundamental change.
  • Charles Blow, The G.O.P.’s Bachmann Problem, The New York Times, 22-3-2013.

• I was always raised to think that Republicans were about limited government, about individual liberty, about fiscal responsibility, about balanced budgets, about a wariness of military adventures abroad, about responsible encouragement to business. There's a whole list of things I thought the Republican Party was all about, and these guys that presently occupy the White House, are categorically against every single one of those things. So if they're Republicans, I'm not. But I'm really not a very comfortable Democrat. I mean the Democrats in the last elections proved themselves to be a bunch of dithering pussies... and it was pathetic. So I'm just waiting until one party or the other actually gets a moral compass and a backbone.
  • John Perry Barlow, in "John Perry Barlow: Wyoming's Estimated Prophet" - interview with Aaron Davis in Planet JH Weekly, 28 July 2005.

• Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican. That’s just a fact of life.
  • William M. Daley, former White House Chief of Staff to President Obama, quoted in The Chicago Tribune (27 April 2012) [2]

• I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.
  • Attributed to Frederick Douglass; reported as unverified in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).

• I knew that however bad the Republican party was, the Democratic party was much worse. The elements of which the Republican party was composed gave better ground for the ultimate hope of the success of the colored man's cause than those of the Democratic party.
  • Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, chapter 47, p. 579 (1941).

• I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.
  • Frederick Douglass, letter to men from Petersburg, Virginia, August 15, 1888. Douglass papers, Library of Congress. The Petersburg men had written Douglass seeking advice about supporting John M. Langston as their Republican candidate for Congress. He would be their first black representative, but earlier he had worked against the Republican party. Douglass called him a trickster and said not to support anyone "whose mad ambition would imperil the success of the Republican party."

• I wouldn’t confuse the conservative movement and the Republican Party, 'cause they're two different things. The Republican Party is sometimes a vehicle for the conservative movement.
  • Joe Gaylord a Republican political consultant, as quoted by "What's Behind the 'Mad as Hell' Movement?" by Jeff Greenfield in CBS News (20 September 2009).

• However strange it seems, the Republican Party really is spinning off into a bizarro-cult who believe Barack Obama is a baby-killer plotting to build death panels for the grannies of America.
  • Johann Hari, "The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult", The Huffington Post (18 August 2009).

• The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital.
  • Bill Maher, as quoted in "Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason", The Independent (19 August 2009).

• When Van Jones called the Republicans assholes, he was paying them a compliment. He was talking about how they can get things done even when they're in the minority, as opposed to the Democrats, who can't seem to get anything done even when they control both houses of Congress, the presidency, and Bruce Springsteen.
  • Bill Maher, in "New Rule: Float Like Obama, Sting Like Ali" at The Huffington Post (11 September 2009).

• In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for. As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican.
  • H.L. Mencken, collected in A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949).

• The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it.
  • P. J. O'Rourke‎, in Parliament of Whores (1991).

• When the chips are down and the decisions are made as to who the candidates will be, then the 11th commandment prevails and everybody goes to work, and that is: Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.
  • Ronald Reagan, in remarks in New York City at a Reception for Delegates to the State Republican Convention (17 June 1982), restating "The Eleventh Commandment" by California Republican Party Chairman Gaylord Parkinson, which Reagan first used in 1966.

• The Republican party is simply not interested in small government now. They're worse than the Democrats they replaced.
  • Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, as quoted in "US spending surges to historic level" by Gail Russell Chaddock, in The Christian Science Monitor (8 December 2003).

• If there were a generic one-word expression for 'one whose fear of the uncertainties of success moves him to surrender at the very moment of victory', it would be 'Republican'.
  • L. Neil Smith, "Some New Tactical Reflections," 15 January 1998.

• The embarrassing truth — the brontosaurus in the broom closet that nobody wants to talk about — is that the Republican Party was never the party of freedom. That Goldwater business in the 1960s was a fluke, immediately snuffed out by "older, wiser heads" in the GOP like those of Nelson Rockefeller, Weeping Willy Scranton, Henry Cabot Lodge, and George Romney. The Republican Party was created in the 1850s by northeastern mercantilists just like them, to crush the hopes of poor southerners for individual liberty and independence, and keep them bound in serfdom, paying 80 percent of all taxes collected in America.
  • L. Neil Smith, "The Brontosaurus in the Broom Closet," The Libertarian Enterprise, 18 October 2009.

• Indeed there are some Republicans I would trust with anything—anything, that is, except public office.
  • Adlai Ewing Stevenson, campaign speech, Illinois state fair, Springfield, Illinois (August 14, 1952); in Major Campaign Speeches of Adlai E. Stevenson, 1952 (1953), p. 14.

• I've always voted Republican because the beliefs of my party mirror those of our founding fathers who gave life to America long ago. Next to my faith, my political views are something I'm proud of.
  • Gale Storm, Interview, TV Legends (1999).

• In [the Irving Kristol] era, rather than being the "stupid party," Republicans became the party of ideas. Neoconservatism's task was, he said, to "convert the Republican Party and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."
  • Jonathan Tobin, in "The power of ideas", in The Jerusalem Post (29 September 2009).

• Apparently millions continue to harbor the strange delusion that the Republican party is the party of free enterprise, and, at least since the New Deal, the party of conservatism. In fact, the party is and always has been the party of state capitalism. That, along with the powers and perks it provides its leaders, is the whole reason for its creation and continued existence. By state capitalism I mean a regime of highly concentrated private ownership, subsidized and protected by government. The Republican party has never, ever opposed any government interference in the free market or any government expenditure except those that might favour labour unions or threaten Big Business. Consider that for a long time it was the party of high tariffs – when high tariffs benefited Northern big capital and oppressed the South and most of the population. Now it is the party of so-called "free trade" – because that is the policy that benefits Northern big capital, whatever it might cost the rest of us. In succession, Republicans presented opposite policies idealistically as good for America, while carefully avoiding discussion of exactly who it was good for.
  • Clyde Wilson, "The Republican Charade: Lincoln and His Party," 12 September 2006.

• I would not speak with disrespect of the Republican Party. I always speak with great respect of the past.
  • Woodrow Wilson, Selected Addresses and Public Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Albert Bushnell Hart, ed. (1918), p. 62.

• The 2009 version of the Republican Party has no boundaries, has no shame and has proved that they will put politics above patriotism at every turn.
  • Brad Woodhouse, the communications director of the Democratic National Committee, as quoted in "Weekend Opinionator: Does the Nobel Hate America?" by Tobin Harshaw in The New York Times (9 October 2009).

• How did the party of Lincoln allow itself to be taken over by the claque of crazies who now define it? How is it that a black person who in many respects is attracted to Republican ideology finds himself revulsed by the party, which seems to have fallen under the control of people who just can't for the life of them make peace with the outcome of the Civil War?
  • Don Wycliff, in "Today's GOP a political bedlam," The Chicago Tribune (27 September 2009).