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* 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'.
* 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'.
** [[w:Jonathan Tobin|Jonathan Tobin]], in [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254163536918&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull "The power of ideas"], in ''The Jerusalem Post'' (29 September 2009).
** [[w:Jonathan Tobin|Jonathan Tobin]], in [http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1254163536918&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull "The power of ideas"], in ''The Jerusalem Post'' (29 September 2009).

*Democrats by a kind of tortured reasoning, sometimes accused Negroes and Republicans of attacking each other so that the crimes would be blamed on the Democrats; investigations revealed that Democrats had committed the acts themselves.
**[[w:Allen W. Trelease|Allen W. Trelease]], [http://www.nationalblackrepublicans.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=pages.DYK-Democrats%20Owe%20Blacks%20an%20Apology University of North Carolina].


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Revision as of 05:48, 10 August 2015

Most people who are successful are Republican. That's just a fact of life. ~ William M. Daley
This gallant old party! ~ Congressional Record of 1875
I'm from the party of Abraham Lincoln. The only flag I want to salute is the American flag. ~ Scott Pinsker
Equality under law promises more than the equal right to vote and transcends mere relief from discrimination by government. It becomes a reality only when all persons have equal opportunity, without distinction of race, religion, color or national origin, to acquire the essentials of life—housing, education and employment. The Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln, from its very beginning has striven to make this promise a reality. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1960
Free men look to us for leadership and support, which we dedicate ourselves to give out of the abundance of our national strength. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1960
The Republican Party was right on civil rights for the first one-hundred years of its existence. It was right when the Democratic Party was wrong. ~ John P. Avlon
For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to 'ultimate extinction'. ~ Eric Foner
Devotion to republicanism does not imply apostasy from truth. ~ Frank Abial Flower
The Republican Party has been the most powerful champion of freedom and equal rights in the world. The feeble and scattered elements that fifty years ago began to combine, here and there, were all lovers of human equality. ~ Frank Abial Flower
Under various names, led by a purer patriotism far in advance of the different political organizations to which they had belonged, they continued to grow in numbers and influence, until, composing a majority of their respective communities in this republic, they were, in response to an inexorable law, drawn into one great spirited army, with a common purpose. Equal and perpetual freedom for all! And a common name. Republican. ~ Frank Abial Flower
Of all the political organizations in America, none has had so hard a struggle for national existence as that known as the Republican Party of today; nor has any political party in any country or age achieved so much for the advance of human liberty and the elevation upon a common platform of the religious and civil equality of all men before the law. ~ Rolander Guy Mcclellan
Republicanism is the religion of a nation; it creates imperial commonwealths out of desert wastes. These 'imperial commonwealths' constitute the foremost nation of the earth. The American republic. It leads them all. ~ Frank Abial Flower
We hold the beacon of civil liberty and personal equality higher than any other. ~ Frank Abial Flower
The light of our civilization goes farther into the jungles of ignorance and barbarism, deeper into the dungeons of tyranny and oppression than that of any other people. We are the load-stone of nations, the guiding star of the world. We have achieved this proud position since the great Republican Party came into power. All these glories are the result of its policy, the offspring of its principles. ~ Frank Abial Flower
The Republican Party was largely founded for one purpose, to stop the spread of slavery into the nation's western territories, and if possible, abolish it altogether. If you think about it, that is still the core purpose of the Republican Party. ~ Mike Jensen
Lincoln asked what it was, above all else, that went forth to the world on July 4, 1776. It was not, he said, the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but something in that declaration giving hope to the world for all future time. The declaration gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all would have an equal chance. These are the principles upon which the Republican Party must stand. ~ Harry V. Jaffa
Its mission is as vitally important as ever. It must guard and protect the people's treasures. For the finer and richer the garden, the more rank will be it growth of weeds when left without the gardener's case. ~ Frank Abial Flower
If the Republicans, who think slavery is wrong, get possession of the general government, we may not root out the evil at once, but may at least prevent its extension. If I find a venomous snake lying on the open praire, I seize the first stick and kill him at once. But if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be more cautious. I shall, in striking the snake, also strike the children, or arouse the reptile to bite the children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with the children. ~ Abraham Lincoln
There were no examples of the Republicans doing anything to prevent the opposition from having freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association. There was a great deal of interference with those rights in the southern states. But they lost the election according to their own rights. And Lincoln said that if people can break up the government rather than accept the results of a fairly conducted election, then the only alternatives are anarchy or tyranny. What is to prevent, he said, anyone of the states seceding from any future union? ~ Harry Victor Jaffa
The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. ~ Calvin Coolidge
Only Grant and his Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, could keep America's promise of equal rights for all men. Lincoln had been the first president to invite Negro participation in the inaugural pageant. Grant was the second. But for Grant, freedom and equal rights were matters of principle, not symbolism. More than even the most progressive-minded white Americans of his time, he rejected prejudice. He knew his soldiers had sacrificed not only to hold the nation together, but also to make men free. He did not want those sacrifices to have been in vain. ~ Charles Lane
Equality of individuals before the law has always been a cornerstone of our party. We therefore oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the crucial issues of our time, we call on all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance. Our country was founded in faith and upon the truth that self-government is rooted. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2000
The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here! ~ Everett McKinley Dirksen
Individual rights, and the responsibilities that go with them, are the foundation of a free society. From the time of Lincoln, equality of individuals has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2008
We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, and we will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes. We ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2008
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
We pledge continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin, or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1964
Law requires equal rights, and it is our policy to end discrimination on account of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1984
The Republican Party has unequivocally recognized that the supreme law of the land is embodied in the constitution, which guarantees to all people the blessings of liberty, due process and equal protection of the laws. It confers upon all native-born and naturalized citizens not only citizenship in the state where the individual resides but citizenship of the United States as well. This is an unqualified right, regardless of race, creed, or color. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1956
The Republican Party points to an impressive record of accomplishment in the field of civil rights and commits itself anew to advancing the rights of all our people regardless of race, creed, color or national origin. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1956
A Republican administration will not endorse situations or constitutions, in whatever society, which are racist in purpose or in effect. It will not expect miracles, but will press for genuine progress in achieving goals consistent with American ideals. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1980
Free speech on college campuses is to be celebrated, but there should be no place in academia for antisemitism or racism, of any kind. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2008
A multi-racial society with guarantees of individual rights is possible and can work. We must remain open and helpful to all parties. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1980
I recognize the Republican Party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety. ~ Frederick Douglass
Under existing conditions the Negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite, not because he agrees with the great principles of state which separate parties, but because, generally, he is opposed to negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. ~ Ulysses S. Grant
Our nation is a land of opportunity for all, and our communities must represent the ideal of equality and justice for every citizen. The Republican Party favors aggressive, proactive measures to ensure that no individual is discriminated against on the basis of race. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2004
We are the party of individual Americans, whose rights we protect and defend as the foundation for opportunity and security for all. Today, as at our founding in the day of Lincoln, we insist no one's rights are negotiable. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the divisive issues of our time, we call on all Republicans and all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1996
The protection of individual rights is the foundation for opportunity and security. The Republican Party is unique in this regard. Since its inception, it has respected every person, even when that proposition was not universally popular. Today, as in the day of Lincoln, we insist that no American's rights are negotiable. That is why we declare that bigotry and prejudice have no place in American life. We denounce all who practice or promote racism. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1992
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
Since its inception, the Republican Party has stood for the worth of every person. On that ground, we support the pluralism and diversity that have been part of our country's greatness. Deep in our hearts, we do believe that bigotry has no place in American life. We denounce those persons, organizations, publications, and movements which practice or promote racism. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1988
Equality of individuals before the law has always been a cornerstone of our party. We therefore oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the crucial issues of our time, we call on all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2000
We do want a law enacted that we may be recognized like other men in the country. Why is it that colored members of Congress cannot enjoy the same immunities that are accorded to white members? Why cannot we stop at hotels here without meeting objection? Why cannot we go into restaurants without being insulted? We are here enacting laws for the country and casting votes upon important questions; we have been sent here by the suffrages of the people, and why cannot we enjoy the same benefits that are accorded to our white colleagues on this floor? ~ Joseph Hayne Rainey
Discrimination against the negro race in this country is unjust, is unworthy of a high-minded people whose example should have a salutary influence in the world. ~ Joseph Hayne Rainey
This nation was created to give expression, validity and purpose to our spiritual heritage—the supreme worth of the individual. In such a nation—a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal—racial discrimination has no place. It can hardly be reconciled with a Constitution that guarantees equal protection under law to all persons. In a deeper sense, too, it is immoral and unjust. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1960
We pledge to help assure equal opportunity and a good education for all. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1964
The Republican Party reaffirms its support of the pluralism and freedom that have been part and parcel of this great country. In so doing, it repudiates and completely disassociates itself from people, organizations, publications, and entities which promulgate the practice of any form of bigotry, racism, antisemitism, or religious intolerance. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1984
Equal rights for men and women; we favor legislation assuring equal pay for equal work regardless of sex. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1952
Through our efforts, de jure segregation is virtually ended. We pledge continuation of these efforts until no American schoolchild suffers educational deprivation because of the color of his skin or the language he speaks and all school children are receiving high quality education. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1972
Immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1864
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The Republican Party includes Americans from every faith and tradition, and our policies and positions respect the right of every American to follow his or her beliefs and underscore our reverence for the religious freedom envisioned by the founding fathers of our nation and of our party. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2012
We favor strengthening our common American identity and loyalty, which includes the contribution and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups. ~ Texan Republican Party Platform of 2014
We shall ever build anew, that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land. ~ Republican Party Platform of 1956
All Americans stand equal before the law. We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity. In the spirit of the constitution, we consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin unacceptable and immoral. We will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes and ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2012
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. ~ Frederick Douglass
We uphold the right of individual Americans to own firearms, a right which antedated the constitution and was solemnly confirmed by the Second Amendment. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2008
Gun ownership is responsible citizenship, enabling Americans to defend themselves, their property, and communities. ~ Republican Party Platform of 2008
On March 20, 1854, the Republican Party was established in Ripon, Wisconsin. Referred to as the 'GOP' or 'Grand Old Party', it established for one reason, to break the chains of slavery and ensure the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be for all Americans. The Republican Party was created to achieve individual freedom. Then, as now. ~ Allen Bernard West
To win in the 21st century, the Party of Lincoln needs to start looking like the Party of Lincoln again. ~ John P. Avlon
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. ~ Bill Maher
Songs such as 'Nigger Doodle Dandy' reflect the racist tone of the Democrats' presidential campaign in 1864. How did Republicans counter? In part, they sought white votes by being anti-racist. The Republican campaign, boosted by military victories in the fall of 1864, proved effective. The Democrats' overt appeals to racism failed, and anti-racist Republicans triumphed almost everywhere. ~ James W. Loewen

The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States of America, along with the Democratic Party. Created in March 1854 for the purpose of diminishing slavery from the United States, the first Republican U.S. president was Abraham Lincoln, who led the United States to victory in the American Civil War, eliminating slavery in the U.S. as a result. The most recent Republican U.S. president was George W. Bush, who was the former governor of the U.S. state of Texas.

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Quotes

Sorted alphabetically by author or source

A

  • Whoever cracked Thaddeus Stevens' skull would let out the brains of the Republican Party.
    • Anonymous saying, quoted in Thaddeus Stevens, Scourge of the South (1959) by Frawn M. Brodie, p. 63.
  • What a pleasant lot of fellows they are. What a pity they have so little sense about politics. If they lived north the last one of them would be Republicans.
    • Chester A. Arthur, as quoted in Recollections of Thirteen Presidents (1906), by John S. Wise.
  • The Republican Party was right on civil rights for the first one-hundred years of its existence. It was right when the Democratic Party was wrong. Its future strength and survival will depend on rediscovering that legacy of individual freedom amid America's essential diversity. To win in the 21st century, the 'Party of Lincoln' needs to start looking like the 'Party of Lincoln' again.

B

  • What would happen to the Democratic Party if they were to lose the election this year? The same thing that happened to it the last time it lost. It would sit in the wings until the Republican Party wiped itself out again.
  • 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.
  • Like all Republicans, I knew that my party was founded in opposition to slavery. But I hadn't understood why this was so necessary until I came to realize how deeply entraced racism was in Congress and just how critical the power of the south was in presidential politics.
  • McCarthy was a Republican. The Democrats, however, have skeletons in their own closet and it's worth remembering them, too. For example, Democrat Woodrow Wilson's Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, who was just as rabid an anti-Communist as McCarthy, did far more to repress free speech and political freedom than McCarthy ever attempted. It wasn't a Republican president who locked up thousands of loyal Americans of Japanese descent in concentration camps for years. It was Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt. And it wasn't a Republican who wiretapped and snooped on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but Democrats John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert, who signed the order as Attorney General.
  • They may not be the quasi-racists that they are often made out to be in the mainstream media, but neither have they made any real effort to reach out African Americans, politically, for a long time. This bad for the Republican Party, bad for black people, and bad for the country. It would be much better for everyone if the black vote was 'in play' and both major parities had to compete for it. As virtual captives of the Democrats since 1936, blacks have ended up being taken for granted by them and mostly ignored by Republicans.
  • I think Republicans should fight for the black vote and blacks should fight for a place in the Republican Party, just as they fought for their civil rights in the last century. It's a necessary thing and each may find more in common with the other than they imagine. Blacks will be in a far stronger position if both parties must compete for their votes.
  • I would urge Republicans to do as I have done and study this nation's racial history. They need to know, I mean really know, things about slavery and racism that they think they know, but really don't. It will make it easier for them to empathize with African Americans, who have really suffered very badly during most of their history in this country in ways that the nation has barely started to acknowledge, let alone compensate for. For too long, white America has taken the view that ti is sufficient simply to stop being racist to make things right for blacks. But the long, long legacy of past racism has never been redressed by either party.
  • The colored men who took their seats in both Senate and House were as a rule studious, earnest, ambitious men, whose public conduct would be honorable to any race.
  • We got a real clear picture of what they all value. Every Republican's voted for it. Look at what they value and look at their budget and what they're proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, 'unchain Wall Street'. They're going to put y'all back in chains.
  • 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.

C

  • During the war 500,000 colored men and boys were called up under the draft, not one of whom sought to evade it. They took their places wherever assigned in defense of the nation of which they are just as truly citizens as are any others. The suggestion of denying any measure of their full political rights to such a great group of our population as the colored people is one which, however it might be received in some other quarters, could not possibly be permitted by one who feels a responsibility for living up to the traditions and maintaining the principles of the Republican Party. Our Constitution guarantees equal rights to all our citizens, without discrimination on account of race or color. I have taken my oath to support that Constitution. It is the source of your rights and my rights. I propose to regard it, and administer it, as the source of the rights of all the people, whatever their belief or race.
  • The history of the Republican Party is marked by vacillation between its founding principle of opportunity and its domination by the wealthy elite. The party came together in the 1850s in opposition to the wealthy slaveholders who controlled the federal government. Democrats acting on their behalf insisted that America’s primary principle was the Constitution's protection of property, and they pushed legislation to let planters monopolize the country’s resources at the expense of the working.
  • Abraham Lincoln and others recoiled from the idea of government as a prop for the rich. In organizing the Republican Party, they highlighted the equality of opportunity promised in the Declaration of Independence and warned that a healthy economy depended on widespread prosperity. Northerners and hardscrabble westerners flocked to that vision, and elected Lincoln to the White House in 1860.
  • The Republican Party is part of a larger American discussion about the tension between equality of opportunity and protection of property, which is sort of the point of the book, that this is a much larger American discussion, and Republicans began under Lincoln with the attempt to turn the discrepancy between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into, at the time, a modern-day political solution. The Republican Party would manage, they hoped, to turn the principle of the Declaration of Independence, that everybody should have equality of opportunity, into a political reality. The Declaration of Independence was, of course, a set of principles; it wasn't any kind of law or codification of those principles. The Constitution went ahead and codified that the central idea of America was the protection of property, so the Republicans began with the idea that they would be the political arm of the Declaration of Independence's equality of opportunity. Throughout their history, three times now, they have swung from that pole through a sort of racist and xenophobic backlash against that principle, tied themselves to big business, and come out protecting the other American principle, which is the protection of property. That tension between equality of opportunity and the protection of property, both of which are central tenets of America, played out in the Republican Party.
  • There are parallels between the 1890s and today in voter suppression laws motivated by white conservatives' fears of growing minority strength at the ballot box. In the 1890s, the suppressors were Democrats. Now they are Republicans.
  • African Americans still supported the Republicans, the party of Lincoln and liberty. Slavery, which almost all Democrats supported before the Civil War, was gone. But, the Democrats were still the party of white supremacy.
  • Abraham Lincoln, the country's first Republican president, led the Union to victory in the Civil War and put slavery on the road to extinction. After the war, the GOP was responsible for constitutional amendments that finished off slavery, made African Americans citizens and put the ballot in the hands of black men. It is one of the great tragedies of our time that that party, the party of Lincoln and liberty, is long gone.
  • We believe the proper role of government is to provide for the people only those critical functions that cannot be performed by individuals or private organizations and that the best government is that which governs least.
  • The Republican Party was born in the early 1850s by anti-slavery activists and individuals who believed that government should grant western lands to settlers free of charge. The first informal meeting of the party took place in Ripon, Wisconsin, a small town northwest of Milwaukee. The first official Republican meeting took place on July 6, 1854 in Jackson, Michigan. The name 'Republican' was chosen because it alluded to equality and reminded individuals of Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party. At the Jackson convention, the new party adopted a platform and nominated candidates for office in Michigan. In 1856, the Republicans became a national party when John C. Fremont was nominated for President under the slogan, 'Free soil, free labor, free speech, free men, Fremont'. Even though they were considered a 'third party' because the Democrats and Whigs represented the two-party system at the time, Fremont received 33% of the vote. Four years later, Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican to win the White House. The Civil War erupted in 1861 and lasted four grueling years. During the war, against the advice of his cabinet, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the slaves. The Republicans of their day worked to pass the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, the Fourteenth, which guaranteed equal protection under the laws, and the Fifteenth, which helped secure voting rights for African-Americans. The Republican Party also played a leading role in securing women the right to vote.
  • In 1896, Republicans were the first major party to favor women's suffrage. When the 19th Amendment finally was added to the Constitution, 26 of 36 state legislatures that had voted to ratify it were under Republican control. The first woman elected to Congress was a Republican, Jeanette Rankin from Montana in 1917. Presidents during most of the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century were Republicans. While the Democrats and Franklin Roosevelt tended to dominate American politics in the 1930s and 40s, for 28 of the forty years from 1952 through 1992, the White House was in Republican hands, under Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush. Under the last two, Reagan and Bush, the United States became the world's only superpower, winning the Cold War from the old Soviet Union and releasing millions from communist oppression.
  • Republicans have a long and rich history with basic principles. Individuals, not government, can make the best decisions. All people are entitled to equal rights; and decisions are best made close to home. The symbol of the Republican Party is the elephant. During the mid term elections way back in 1874, Democrats tried to scare voters into thinking President Grant would seek to run for an unprecedented third term. Thomas Nast, a cartoonist for Harper's Weekly, depicted a Democratic jackass trying to scare a Republican elephant, and both symbols stuck.
  • For a long time Republicans have been known as the 'GOP', and party faithfuls thought it meant the 'Grand Old Party'. But apparently the original meaning, in 1875, was 'gallant old party'. And when automobiles were invented it also came to mean, 'get out and push'. That's still a pretty good slogan for Republicans who depend every campaign year on the hard work of hundreds of thousands of volunteers to get out and vote and push people to support the causes of the Republican Party.

D

  • 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.
    • Frederick Douglass, attributed to, but 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, as quoted in 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."

E

  • The announcement that the Amendment had been passed by a vote of 119 to 56 was received by the members on the floor and the visitors in the galleries with an outburst of enthusiasm rarely witnessed in the Capitol. Republicans sprang from their seats, and, regardless of parliamentary rules or the Speaker’s efforts to enforce silence, cheered and applauded. The men in the galleries joined in the uproar, while ladies clapped their hands, waved their handkerchiefs, and uttered exclamations of delight and enthusiasm.

F

  • Conservatives made history this year. For the first time, an avowed atheist addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, the big annual gathering of conservative activists. And atheists occupied an exhibitor’s booth, another first. Jamila Bey, an African American journalist and board member of the group American Atheists, didn’t exactly wow the crowd, for whom professions of religious faith and a belief in God are standard fare. But she wasn’t booed either. For the atheists, long held at arm’s length by Republicans, that’s progress.
  • The Republican Party has been the most powerful champion of freedom and equal rights in the world. The feeble and scattered elements that fifty years ago began to combine, here and there, were all lovers of human equality. Under various names, led by a purer patriotism far in advance of the different political organizations to which they had belonged, they continued to grow in numbers and influence, until, composing a majority of their respective communities in this republic, they were, in response to an inexorable law, drawn into one great spirited army, with a common purpose, equal and perpetual freedom for all, and a common name, Republican.
  • It is common for our enemies, and the more superficial members of our own household, to regard the Republican Party as an organization that has little more to do except keep itself in office. The cry that 'the mission of the Republican Party is ended' and that therefore small misfortune, except that it will place the Democrats in power, will result if it shall be dethroned, contains as little truth as the declaration of the church is ended because the Bible is printed.
  • Democracy is the creed of a province; it dwells in fetid wards. Republicanism is the religion of a nation; it creates imperial commonwealths out of desert wastes. These 'imperial commonwealths' constitute the foremost nation of the earth, the American republic. It leads them all in public school systems, home comforts, multiplicity of labor-saving machinery, public service, perfect autonomy of government for local communities, modes of travel, engines of general intelligence, public caravansaries, means of adjudicating disputes between man and man, freedom of thought, religion, press and speech, and in the utmost freedom of action in individuals consistent with good order and the rights of others, without the slightest government restraint or espionage. Notwithstanding the crimes of the south against the blacks, we hold the beacon of civil liberty and personal equality higher than any other nation. The light of our civilization goes farther into the jungles of ignorance and barbarism, deeper into the dungeons of tyranny and oppression than that of any other people. We are the load-stone of nations, the guiding star of the world. We have achieved this proud position since the great Republican Party came into power. All these glories are the result of its policy, the offspring of its principles. Its mission is as vitally important as ever. It must guard and protect the people's treasures. For the finer and richer the garden, the more rank will be it growth of weeds when left without the gardener's case.
  • Lincoln shared many of the prevailing prejudices of his era. But, he insisted, there was a bedrock principle of equality that transcended race. The equal right to the fruits of one's labor. There are many grounds for condemning the institution of slavery. Moral, religious, political, economic. Lincoln referred to all of them at one time or another. But ultimately he saw slavery as a form of theft, of one person appropriating the labor of another. Using a black woman as an illustration, he explained the kind of equality in which he believed, 'In some respects she certainly is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of all others'. Shortly before the 1860 election, Frederick Douglass offered a succinct summary of the dilemma confronting opponents of slavery like Lincoln, who worked within the political system rather than outside it. Abstractly, Douglass wrote, most northerners would agree that slavery was wrong. The challenge was to find a way of 'translating antislavery sentiment into antislavery action'. The constitution barred interference with slavery in the states where it already existed. For Lincoln, as for most Republicans, antislavery action meant not attacking slavery where it was but working to prevent slavery's westward expansion. Lincoln, however, did talk about a future without slavery. The aim of the Republican Party, he insisted, was to put the institution on the road to 'ultimate extinction', a phrase he borrowed from Henry Clay. Ultimate extinction could take a long time. Lincoln once said that slavery might survive for another hundred years. But to the south, Lincoln seemed as dangerous as an abolitionist, because he was committed to the eventual end of slavery. This was why his election in 1860 led inexorably to secession and civil war.

G

  • The Republican Party ended slavery. Most blacks were Republican. Democrats gave us Jim Crow laws. Republicans introduced civil rights legislation time and again; Democrats opposed it. Democrats opposed passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments, which gave equality to black Americans. The Reconstruction Act, the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1875, 1957 and 1960 and the Enforcement Act of 1870 also were opposed by Democrats. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower created the Civil Rights Commission. He sent federal troops into the south to desegregate the schools. Republicans created the Historically Black Colleges and University Program and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Martin Luther King organized the March on Washington with a black Republican, A. Philip Randolph. Democratic President Woodrow Wilson's Cabinet segregated government offices. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed KKK member Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Roosevelt opposed federal lynching laws. Lester Maddox, George Wallace and Orval Faubus, all Democratic governors, were fervent racists. Democratic Attorney General Robert Kennedy had Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. wiretapped, much like we do today to suspected terrorists and criminals. The Democratic Party keeps black Americans and all minority groups in poverty with 'entitlement' programs and policies preventing advancement. The Republican Party strives to provide opportunity and upward mobility to all Americans.
  • The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party, while it attracts to itself by its creed, the scattered advocates of exploded political heresies, of condemned theories in political economy, the advocates of commercial restrictions, of protection, of special privileges, of waste and corruption in the administration of Government; anti-slavery is its mission and its purpose.
  • The problem comes in viewing Goldwater as an example rather than as a warning. Conservatives sometimes describe his defeat as a necessary, preliminary step — a clarifying and purifying struggle — in the Reagan revolution. In fact, it was an electoral catastrophe that awarded Lyndon Johnson a powerful legislative majority, increased the liberal ambitions of the Great Society and caused massive distrust of the GOP among poor and ethnic voters. The party has never quite recovered. Ronald Reagan was, in part, elected president by undoing Goldwater’s impression of radicalism. And all of Reagan’s domestic achievements involved cleaning up just a small portion of the excesses that Goldwater's epic loss enabled. The Republican Party needs internal debate and populist energy. But it is not helped by nostalgia for a disaster.
  • Under existing conditions the negro votes the Republican ticket because he knows his friends are of that party. Many a good citizen votes the opposite, not because he agrees with the great principles of state which separate parties, but because, generally, he is opposed to negro rule. This is a most delusive cry. Treat the negro as a citizen and a voter, as he is and must remain, and soon parties will be divided, not on the color line, but on principle. Then we shall have no complaint of sectional interference.
  • Now, the Democrats have a different plan. The Democrats say that, 'If you have health insurance, we're going to make it better. If you don't have health insurance, we going to provide it to you. If you can’t afford health insurance, then we'll help you afford health insurance'. So America gets to decide. Do you want the Democratic plan, or do you want the Republican plan? Remember, the Republican plan. 'Don't get sick. And if you do get sick, die quickly'.
  • America understands that there is one party in this country that is favor of health care reform and one party that is against it, and they know why. They understand that if Barack Obama were somehow able to cure hunger in the world the Republicans would blame him for overpopulation. They understand that if Barack Obama could somehow bring about world peace they would blame him for destroying the defense industry. In fact, they understand that if Barack Obama has a BLT sandwich tommorrow for lunch, they will try to ban bacon. But that's not what America wants, America wants solutions to its problems and that begins with health care, and that's what I'm speaking for tonight.
  • Fox News and their Republican collaborators are the enemy of America. The enemy of anybody who wants anything good for this country.
  • I think Bill Clinton was the best Republican president we've had in a while.

H

  • The first act of the black republican party will be to exclude slavery from all the territories, from the District of Columbia, the arsenals and the forts, by the action of the general government. That would be a recognition that slavery is a sin, and confine the institution to its present limits. The moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil, a sin, by the general government, that moment the safety of the rights of the south will be entirely gone.
  • Why would the Republican Party insult its members with such a disingenuous offering of the Republican Party’s ideals? If the Republican Party really believes that individual rights are the foundation of a free society and that the Republican Party considers discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, why does the Republican Party make it a point in their platform to call for a constitutional amendment prohibiting same sex marriage? If the Republican Party believes in the devotion to the inherent dignity and rights of every person, why is it that the Republican Party wants to take away the right for a woman under any circumstances from having an abortion? If the Republican Party believes in freedom of speech and freedom of the press and opposes all attempts to violate or weaken those rights, why is it that the Republican Party wants to take away those same freedoms by passing legislation making it a crime to desecrate the American flag?
  • I am a Republican. However, the Republican Party has lost its way. Those who either believe in or are afraid to take a stance against exorbitant government spending as a way to solve our nations problems have hijacked the Republican Party. The Republican Party is now controlled by the religious right who refuse to support a Republican candidate who believes that it is not the place of the government to interfere with its citizen’s personal choices.
  • For the Republican Party to rise to power again, it must remember its fiscally conservative roots while embracing a more socially liberal platform. Why? Because I believe that the majority of the people in this country are close enough to the center to embrace this new platform. It is clearly evident that the Republican Party has not only disenfranchised many members of its own party, but has also lost touch with independents and moderate liberals as well. In my opinion, the reality is that most people in the United States are fiscally conservative. They want a fair tax policy. They believe in limited government. They want a balanced budget. They believe in deregulation. However, in my opinion, the other reality is that most people in the United States consider themselves to be more socially liberal. While many people feel that having an abortion or same sex marriage is immoral, those same people believe that the government should not pass 'moral legislation' and take away those choices for each individual to make. How does restricting an individual’s rights unify our country? Therefore, the purpose of this blog is to have an open discussion about how the Republican Party can win back voters at a national level. Demographics have helped win back Congress, but more is needed to win in 2016. Republicans cannot be afraid to take on the establishment. Big money cannot control who can and cannot successful run for office. Republicans cannot be beholden the far right.

J

  • Kemp declared that the Republican Party is the 'Party of Lincoln'. But just what is the connection between the Republican Party of 1860 and that of 1996? The essence of slavery, Lincoln said, was expressed in the proposition 'You work; I'll eat'. Upon his election as president, he was besieged by office seekers who drove him to distraction. Lincoln was blunt in his judgment of the great majority of them. They wanted to eat without working. Lincoln saw the demand for the protection of slavery and the demand for government sinecures to be at bottom one and the same. The origin of all constitutional rights, according to Lincoln, was the right that a man had to own himself, and therefore to own the product of his own labor. Government exists to protect that right, and to regulate property only to make it more valuable to its possessors.
  • Abraham Lincoln was self-educated. His curriculum included Shakespeare, the Bible, Euclid and the Declaration of Independence, the monuments to the freedom of the human soul, the possession not of western man, but of a humanity compounded of all colors and every condition. In Independence Hall on February 22, 1861, Lincoln asked what it was, above all else, that went forth to the world on July 4, 1776. It was not, he said, the mere matter of the separation of the colonies from the motherland, but something in that declaration giving hope to the world for all future time. The declaration gave promise that in due time the weights would be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all would have an equal chance. These are the principles upon which the Republican Party must stand.
  • If a minority, losing an election, can break up the government rather than accept the results of the election, free government is impossible. If the only alternatives to rule by a constitutional majority, I say, constitutional majority, a majority formed under the rules of the constitution with minority rights secured. There were no examples of the Republicans doing anything to prevent the opposition from having freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of association. There was a great deal of interference with those rights in the southern states. But they lost the election according to their own rights. And Lincoln said that if people can break up the government rather than accept the results of a fairly conducted election, then the only alternatives are anarchy or tyranny. What is to prevent, he said, anyone of the states seceding from any future union?
  • The Republican Party was largely founded for one purpose, to stop the spread of slavery into the nation's western territories, and if possible, abolish it altogether. If you think about it, that is still the core purpose of the Republican Party. The logical flip side of this coin, of course, is that the Democratic Party was, and still is, a pro-slavery political party. Now we simply need to help those in slavery understand that they are in slavery.
  • It's not easy to be a young, black Republican. Friends and family often give them the side eye, and some people who don't know them at all consider them to be 'traitors'. They also don't have the same access to a tightly interwoven network of professional contacts and connections as their counterparts in the Democratic Party, which the vast majority of African-American elected officials is affiliated. So, what's the attraction? For many it's a combination of history and good old-fashioned conservative values. The GOP, they argue, is the party that emancipated blacks from slavery, gave them the right to vote and provided other opportunities toward independence.

K

  • The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.
    • Laurence Massillon Keitt, as quoted in "Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House" (25 January 1860), The Congressional Globe.
  • Finally, in a rich irony, it is the right that has long blocked a national I.D. scheme. Exactly the kinds of righties who make up the birthers, radical libertarians, militia types, NRA members, are also the most vehement opponents of a national I.D. card, because it is seen as a step toward tyranny and government tracking of weapons ownership. So you can't say Obama lacks his paperwork, when you think too much paperwork is the beginning of world government.
  • One of the great disappointments of my time in the U.S. this summer was the silliness and extremism of the Republican reaction to Obama's defeat. Instead of playing a constructive role as an opposition party, it is descending into lunacy. Glenn Beck called Obama a racist; health means enforced abortion. Palin declared Obamacare 'downright evil'. This is bad for the GOP and, in the medium-term, for the country also.

L

  • You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it, and what is your proof? Harper's Ferry? John Brown? John Brown was no Republican, and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper's Ferry enterprise. If any member of our party is guilty in that matter, you know it or you do not know it. If you do know it, you are inexcusable for not designating the man and proving the fact. If you do not know it, you are inexcusable for asserting it, and especially for persisting in the assertion after you have tried and failed to make the proof. You need to be told that persisting in a charge which one does not know to be true, is simply malicious slander. Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper's Ferry affair.
  • But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union, and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!' To be sure, what the robber demanded of me, my money, was my own, and I had a clear right to keep it, but it was no more my own than my vote is my own, and the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote, can scarcely be distinguished in principle.
  • If the Republicans, who think slavery is wrong, get possession of the general government, we may not root out the evil at once, but may at least prevent its extension. If I find a venomous snake lying on the open praire, I seize the first stick and kill him at once. But if that snake is in bed with my children, I must be more cautious. I shall, in striking the snake, also strike the children, or arouse the reptile to bite the children. Slavery is the venomous snake in bed with the children. But if the question is whether to kill it on the prairie or put it in bed with other children, I think we'd kill it!
  • Slavery is the question, the all absorbing topic of the day. It is true that all of us, and by that I mean, not the Republican Party alone, but the whole American people, here and elsewhere, all of us wish this question settled, wish it out of the way. It stands in the way, and prevents the adjustment, and the giving of necessary attention to other questions of national house-keeping. The people of the whole nation agree that this question ought to be settled, and yet it is not settled. And the reason is that they are not yet agreed how it shall be settled. All wish it done, but some wish one way and some another, and some a third, or fourth, or fifth; different bodies are pulling in different directions, and none of them having a decided majority, are able to accomplish the common object.
  • We think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference.
  • Songs such as 'Nigger Doodle Dandy' reflect the racist tone of the Democrats' presidential campaign in 1864. How did Republicans counter? In part, they sought white votes by being anti-racist. The Republican campaign, boosted by military victories in the fall of 1864, proved effective. The Democrats' overt appeals to racism failed, and anti-racist Republicans triumphed almost everywhere. One New York Republican wrote 'The change of opinion on this slavery question ... is a great and historic fact. Who could have predicted ... this great and blessed revolution?' People around the world supported the Union because of its ideology.

M

  • 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.
  • Only a Republican, perhaps only a Nixon, could have made this break and gotten away with it.
    • Mike Mansfield, U.S. Senate Democratic leader, as quoted in, in U.S. News and World Report (6 December 1971), on Nixon's pending trip to China; the phrase later became popular as "Only Nixon could go to China".
  • The GOP defends the cultural prerogatives, regional pork spending and general identitarian beliefs of the majority of whites, as it has since 1968. Outside of white progressives and suburban white faux-gressives, it has become the party of the white proletariat and a bygone America. Furthermore, it protects the status quo, which benefits whites. Even subconsciously, folks know that the GOP defends their class interests against a party that defends them slightly less, and the Dems are becoming more multicultural, not less. If the housing issue springs up, expect the suburbs to go GOP too as a matter of keeping up property values. The GOP appeals to the very white 'Chevy Commercial America', where star-spangled trucks powered on eagle tears haul five tons of coal up mountains while a gravely-voiced narrator and Kid Rock blare in the background about working hard. They are a cultural faction, even moreso than a talking shop for the corporate set; they represent the non-postmodern idyllic version of America.
  • Men who dare to avow themselves here as Republicans should be promptly brande as the bitter and malignant enemies.
  • 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.
  • Black Americans, in that era, were in solid support of the Republican Party. This was the party that fought the northern and southern Democrats to pass the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. Although President Andrew Johnson tried to bamboozle Frederick Douglass to the Democrat side by making false or empty promises, he did not succeed. Douglass was no fool and was not going to let Johnson use him to gain the support of the Negroes in his effort to be 'elected' president. Frederick Douglass and other prominent Blacks threw their support to Ulysses S. Grant for president.

N

  • The Republican Party was started in 1854 as the anti-slavery party by abolitionists opposed to keeping blacks in human bondage, and Republicans, under the leadership of President Abraham Lincoln, fought to free blacks from slavery. After the Civil War, Republicans amended the U.S. Constitution to grant blacks freedom, Thirteenth Amendment, citizenship, Fourteenth Amendment, and the right to vote, Fifteenth Amendment. Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled south, one that was fair to blacks. In the book The Political Lincoln: An Encyclopedia Professors Paul Finkleman and Martin J. Hershock debunk the absurd myth that President Lincoln was somehow a 'racist' because of his measured approach to ending slavery in the rebelling south first, while waging a war to end all slavery nationwide. If the Democrats had left blacks alone at this moment in history, our nation would not be faced with racial divisiveness today. Instead, Democrats set for themselves the horrendous task of keeping blacks in virtual slavery.
  • The core socialist philosophy of the Democrats is to give a man a fish, so he can eat for a day. Socialism uses welfare, giving a man a fish, to keep blacks in poverty. The core enterprise philosophy of the Republicans is to teach a man how to fish so he can feed himself for a lifetime.
  • When the key votes in the House and the Senate came fifty years ago, Republicans were significantly more supportive of the Civil Rights Act than were Democrats. The measure passed the House on a 290-130 vote, with support from 61 percent of House Democrats. 152 in favor, 96 opposed. But Republican lawmakers gave it 80 percent backing. 138 in support, just thirty-four against. The critical test came in the Senate in June 1964. Republicans aligned with northern Democrats to break the segregationist filibuster. Then, 82 percent of Republican senators backed the final passage of the measure, as opposed to two-thirds of Senate Democrats.
  • Civil rights advocates within the Republican Party either left or were defeated. House minority leader Charles Halleck, the Indianan Republican who worked closely with the Johnson administration to pass muscular civil rights protections was deposed the following January by his own caucus. John Lindsay, who was rejected in his own party's 1969 New York City mayoral primary, winning instead on the Liberal Party line, became a Democrat in 1971. His ally in the 1963 civil rights push 'Mac' Mathias was so unsettled by the GOP's move to the right that he threatened to run for the presidency in 1976 as a progressive independent. Others champions of civil rights, such as Californian senator Thomas Kuchel, the Republican floor manager in the fights to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, New Jersey Senator Clifford Case and New York Senator Jacob Javits, would eventually lose primaries to conservative challengers.
  • There have been plenty of Republicans since, notably former Congressman Jack Kemp and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who have sought to broaden the party’s focus and appeal. But as one of the great Republican advocates of civil rights, John Lindsay, noted when he left the GOP in 1971, 'Today the Republican Party has moved so far from what I perceive as necessary policies ... that I can no longer try to work within it'. John Avlon, the longtime speechwriter for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani who has since become a prominent advocate for centrist projects such as the 'No Labels' movement, wrote several years ago: 'The Republican Party was right on civil rights for the first 100 years of its existence. It was right when the Democratic Party was wrong. Its future strength and survival will depend on rediscovering that legacy of individual freedom amid America's essential diversity. To win in the 21st century, the Party of Lincoln needs to start looking like the Party of Lincoln again'. This is true.
  • Republicans have a right to reflect proudly on the role the GOP played in securing approval of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This anniversary belongs to both parties, to Democrats who recall Johnson's leadership, to Republicans who recall the role played by congressional Republicans. Unfortunately, the Republican Party that has spent much of its energy in recent years promoting restrictive Voter I.D. laws and that is currently entertaining a telling debate about Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran’s outreach to African-American voters in last month’s runoff election fight, often finds itself at odds with the legacies of Lincoln and the Republicans who championed civil rights in the mid-1960s.
  • The Republican Party should take a very hard look at its past, and it should embrace that past.

O

  • And as far as the budget goes, it's time for responsible Republicans who share these goals -- and there are a number of folks out there who I think are decent folks, I've got some disagreements with them on some issues, but I think genuinely want to see the economy grow and want what's best for the American people -- it's time for those Republicans to step up and they've got to decide what they want to prioritize.
  • 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.
  • The difference between American parties is actually simple. Democrats are in favor of higher taxes to pay for greater spending, while Republicans are in favor of greater spending, for which the taxpayers will pay. In foreign policy, Republicans intend to pursue the war in Iraq but to do so with a minimal number of troops on the ground. This is not to be confused with the disastrous Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld policy of using a minimal number of troops on the ground to pursue the war in Iraq. Democrats intend to end the war, but they don't know when. Democrats are making the 'high school sex promise': I'll pull out in time, honest!

P

  • It has always floored me how the Republican Party seemingly allows the Democrats and the left to paint them as racists. What amazes me even more is how successful the Democrats have been at rewriting their own sordid past; blaming the GOP for the crimes they themselves are guilty of. But that's an old leftist tactic; always blame the enemy for the very same crimes they themselves are guilty of. This tried-and true tactic puts the other side on the defensive.
  • Out of the roughly 4,500 who were killed at the end of KKK ropes, approximately 1,300 were white Republicans. Almost one out of four lynchings that occurred in the United States were perpetrated against white Republicans.
  • In 1854, the anti-slavery members of the Democratic Party joined forces with the abolitionists and formed a new political party. They called themselves the Republican Party. Their primary goal and mission was to end slavery and give blacks the same rights afforded to white citizens.
  • There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities.
  • Some say that Republicans shouldn't bother engaging with the black community. It’s a lost cause, they say, pointing to single-digit support in previous presidential elections. We disagree. We know when we engage, we win, and moreover black America wins. Just last November, in Ohio, one in four black men voted for your Republican governor. They voted their values. This kind of voter engagement can make a big difference. And given the opportunity to make the choice, black voters can help us open doors that expand opportunity for all. As Chairman, I have made this a priority because no voter should be overlooked, and no voter should be taken for granted.

R

  • But we do want a law enacted that we may be recognized like other men in the country. Why is it that colored members of Congress cannot enjoy the same immunities that are accorded to white members? Why cannot we stop at hotels here without meeting objection? Why cannot we go into restaurants without being insulted? We are here enacting laws for the country and casting votes upon important questions; we have been sent here by the suffrages of the people, and why cannot we enjoy the same benefits that are accorded to our white colleagues on this floor? I say to you gentlemen, that this discrimination against the negro race in this country is unjust, is unworthy of a high-minded people whose example should have a salutary influence in the world.
  • We intend to continue to vote so long as the government gives us the right and necessary protection; and I know that right accorded to us now will never be withheld in the future if left to the Republican Party.
  • Republicans enacted civil rights laws in the 1950s and 1960s, over the objection of Democrats. Republicans founded the HBCUs, Historical Black College's and Universities, and started the NAACP to counter the racist practices of the Democrats. Republicans pushed through much of the ground-breaking civil rights legislation in Congress. Republicans fought slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom, citizenship and the right to vote. Republicans pushed through much of the groundbreaking civil rights legislation from the 1860s through the 1960s. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower sent troops into the South to desegregate the schools. Republican President Eisenhower appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Democrat President Lyndon Johnson, was the one who pushed through the civil rights laws of the 1960s. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. Republican and black American, A. Phillip Randolph, organized the 1963 March by Dr. King on Washington.
  • The 1964 Civil Rights Act Roll Call Vote. In the House, only 64 percent of the Democrats. 153 yes, 91 no, but 80 percent of the Republicans, 136 yes, 35 no, voted for it. In the Senate, while only 68 percent of the Democrats endorsed the bill. 46 yes, 21 no, 82 percent of the Republicans voted to enact it. 27 yes, 6 no.
  • During the Senate debates on the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, it was revealed that members of the Democratic Party formed many terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan to murder and intimidate African Americans voters. The Ku Klux Klan Act was a bill introduced by a Republican Congress to stop Klan Activities. History reveals that Democrats lynched, burned, mutilated and murdered thousands of blacks and completely destroyed entire towns and communities occupied by middle class blacks, including Rosewood, Florida, the Greenwood District in Tulsa Oklahoma, and Wilmington, North Carolina to name a few.
  • History reveals that it was abolitionists and Radical Republicans such as Henry L. Morehouse and General Oliver Howard that started many of the traditional black colleges, while Democrats fought to keep them closed. Many of our traditional Black colleges are named after white Republicans. After exclusively giving the Democrats their votes for the past 25 years, the average African American cannot point to one piece of civil rights legislation sponsored solely by the Democratic Party that was specifically designed to eradicate the unique problems that African Americans face today. As of 2004, the Democrat party, the oldest political party in America, has never elected a black man to the United States Senate, the Republicans have elected three.
  • I think it is much easier to be a good member of the Church and a Democrat than a good member of the Church and a Republican.
  • The Republican Party and the abolitionist movement both were originally established to defend those who could not defend themselves, mainly American slaves who were not considered human but were considered property. The principle of the sanctity of human life is a core value of the Republican Party which has advocated that the unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed.
  • With our republican fathers, we hold it to be a self-evident truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our federal government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction.
  • As our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision of the constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing slavery in the territories of the United States by positive legislation, prohibiting its existence or extension therein.
  • We deny the authority of congress, of a territorial Legislation, of any individual, or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any territory of the United States, while the present constitution shall be maintained.
  • We brand the recent reopening of the African slave trade, under the cover of our national flag, aided by perversions of judicial power, as a crime against humanity and a burning shame to our country and age; and we call upon Congress to take prompt and efficient measures for the total and final suppression of that execrable traffic.
  • The Republican Party is opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired.
  • It is the highest duty of every American citizen to maintain against all their enemies the integrity of the Union and the paramount authority of the constitution and laws of the United States; and that, laying aside all differences of political opinion, we pledge ourselves, as Union men, animated by a common sentiment and aiming at a common object, to do everything in our power to aid the Government in quelling by force of arms the Rebellion now raging against its authority, and in bringing to the punishment due to their crimes the rebels and traitors arrayed against it.
  • We approve the determination of the government of the United States not to compromise with rebels, or to offer them any terms of peace, except such as may be based upon an unconditional surrender of their hostility and a return to their just allegiance to the constitution and laws of the United States, and that we call upon the government to maintain this position and to prosecute the war with the utmost possible vigor to the complete suppression of the Rebellion, in full reliance upon the self-sacrificing patriotism, the heroic valor and the undying devotion of the American people to the country and its free institutions.
  • As slavery was the cause, and now constitutes the strength of this rebellion, and as it must be, always and everywhere, hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and the national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the republic; and that, while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by which the government, in its own defense, has aimed a deathblow at this gigantic evil, we are in favor, furthermore, of such an amendment to the constitution, to be made by the people in conformity with its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits of the jurisdiction of the United States.
  • Resolved, that we approve and applaud the practical wisdom, the unselfish patriotism and the unswerving fidelity to the constitution and the principles of American liberty, with which Abraham Lincoln has discharged, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, the great duties and responsibilities of the presidential office; that we approve and endorse, as demanded by the emergency and essential to the preservation of the nation and as within the provisions of the constitution, the measures and acts which he has adopted to defend the nation against its open and secret foes; that we approve, especially, the Proclamation of Emancipation, and the employment as Union soldiers of men heretofore held in slavery; and that we have full confidence in his determination to carry these and all other constitutional measures essential to the salvation of the country into full and complete effect.
  • Immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.
  • The people of the United States can never regard with indifference the attempt of any European power to overthrow by force or to supplant by fraud the institutions of any republican government on the western continent and that they will view with extreme jealousy, as menacing to the peace and independence of their own country, the efforts of any such power to obtain new footholds for monarchical government, sustained by foreign military force, in near proximity to the United States.
  • We maintain that man was not born to be ruled, but that he consented to be governed, and that the reasons that moved him thereto are few and simple. He has voluntarily submitted to government because, only by the establishment of just laws, and the power to enforce those laws, can an orderly life be maintained, full and equal opportunity for all be established, and the blessings of liberty be perpetuated. We hold that government, and those entrusted with government, should set a high example of honesty, of justice, and unselfish devotion to the public good; that they should labor to maintain tranquility at home and peace and friendship with all the nations of the earth.
  • We condemn bigots who inject class, racial and religious prejudice into public and political matters. Bigotry is un-American and a danger to the republic. We deplore the duplicity and insincerity of the party in power in racial and religious matters. Although they have been in office as a 'Majority Party' for many years, they have not kept nor do they intend to keep their promises. The Republican Party will not mislead, exploit or attempt to confuse minority groups for political purposes. All American citizens are entitled to full, impartial enforcement of Federal laws relating to their civil rights.
  • We believe that the federal government should take supplemental action within its constitutional jurisdiction to oppose discrimination against race, religion or national origin.
  • We will prove our good faith by appointing qualified persons, without distinction of race, religion or national origin, to responsible positions in the government.
  • We will prove our good faith by federal action toward the elimination of lynching. Federal action toward the elimination of poll taxes as a prerequisite to voting.
  • We will prove our good faith by enacting Federal legislation to further just and equitable treatment in the area of discriminatory employment practices.
  • We recommend to Congress the submission of a Constitutional Amendment providing equal rights for men and women; we favor legislation assuring equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.
  • Upon this statement of truths and this pledge of performance, the Republican Party stands confident that it expresses the hopes of the citizens of America and certain that it points out with integrity a road upon which free men may march into a new day—a new and better day, in which shall be fulfilled the decent aspirations of our people for peace, for solvency and for the fulfillment of our best welfare, under the guidance of divine providence.
  • We shall ever build anew, that our children and their children, without distinction because of race, creed or color, may know the blessings of our free land.
  • Fight for the elimination of discrimination in employment because of race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry or sex.
  • The Republican Party points to an impressive record of accomplishment in the field of civil rights and commits itself anew to advancing the rights of all our people regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
  • The many Negroes who have been appointed to high public positions have played a significant part in the progress.
  • The Republican Party has unequivocally recognized that the supreme law of the land is embodied in the Constitution, which guarantees to all people the blessings of liberty, due process and equal protection of the laws. It confers upon all native-born and naturalized citizens not only citizenship in the State where the individual resides but citizenship of the United States as well. This is an unqualified right, regardless of race, creed or color.
  • We believe that true progress can be attained through intelligent study, understanding, education and good will. Use of force or violence by any group or agency will tend only to worsen the many problems inherent in the situation. This progress must be encouraged and the work of the courts supported in every legal manner by all branches of the federal government to the end that the constitutional ideal of the law, regardless of race, creed or color, be steadily achieved.
  • The Republican Party supports an immigration policy which is in keeping with the traditions of America in providing a haven for oppressed peoples, and which is based on equality of treatment, freedom from implications of discrimination between racial, nationality and religious groups, and flexible enough to conform to changing needs and conditions.
  • We approve appropriate action to oppose the imposition by foreign governments of discrimination against United States citizens, based on their religion or race.
  • Segregation in the active Armed Forces of the United States has been ended. For the first time in our history there is no segregation in veterans' hospitals and among civilians on naval bases. This is an impressive record. We pledge ourselves to continued progress in this field. The Republican Party has unequivocally recognized that the supreme law of the land is embodied in the constitution, which guarantees to all people the blessings of liberty, due process and equal protection of the laws. It confers upon all native-born and naturalized citizens not only citizenship in the state where the individual resides but citizenship of the United States as well. This is an unqualified right, regardless of race, creed, or color. The Republican Party accepts the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court that racial discrimination in publicly supported schools must be progressively eliminated. We concur in the conclusion of the Supreme Court that its decision directing school desegregation should be accomplished with "all deliberate speed" locally through Federal District Courts. The implementation order of the Supreme Court recognizes the complex and acutely emotional problems created by its decision in certain sections of our country where racial patterns have been developed in accordance with prior and long-standing decisions of the same tribunal. We believe that true progress can be attained through intelligent study, understanding, education and good will. Use of force or violence by any group or agency will tend only to worsen the many problems inherent in the situation. This progress must be encouraged and the work of the courts supported in every legal manner by all branches of the federal government to the end that the constitutional ideal of the law, regardless of race, creed or color, be steadily achieved.
  • Free men look to us for leadership and support, which we dedicate ourselves to give out of the abundance of our national strength.
  • This nation was created to give expression, validity and purpose to our spiritual heritage, the supreme worth of the individual. In such a nation, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, racial discrimination has no place. It can hardly be reconciled with a constitution that guarantees equal protection under law to all persons. In a deeper sense, too, it is immoral and unjust. As to those matters within reach of political action and leadership, we pledge ourselves unreservedly to its eradication.
  • Equality under law promises more than the equal right to vote and transcends mere relief from discrimination by government. It becomes a reality only when all persons have equal opportunity, without distinction of race, religion, color or national origin, to acquire the essentials of life—housing, education and employment. The Republican Party—the party of Abraham Lincoln—from its very beginning has striven to make this promise a reality. It is today, as it was then, unequivocally dedicated to making the greatest amount of progress toward the objective.
  • To Republicans, liberty is still today man's most precious possession. For every citizen, and for the generations to come, we Republicans vow that it shall be preserved.
  • We pledge continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin, or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.
  • It is a high mission of government to help assure equal opportunity for all, affording every citizen an equal chance at the starting line but never determining who is to win or lose. But government must also reflect the nation's compassionate concern for those who are unable, through no fault of their own, to provide adequately for themselves.
  • We pledge to continue the advancement of education on all levels, through such programs as selective aid to higher education, strengthened State and local tax resources, including tax credits for college education, while resisting the Democratic efforts which endanger local control of schools.
  • We pledge to open avenues of peaceful progress in solving racial controversies while discouraging lawlessness and violence.
  • We pledge full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen.
  • Twice before, our party gave the people of America leadership at a time of crisis, leadership which won us peace in place of war, unity in place of discord, compassion in place of bitterness. A century ago, Abraham Lincoln` gave that leadership. From it came one nation, consecrated to liberty and justice for all. Fifteen years ago, Dwight D. Eisenhower gave that leadership. It brought the end of a war, eight years of peace, enhanced respect in the world, orderly progress at home, and trust of our people in their leaders and in themselves.
  • Americans critically need—and are eager for; new and dynamic leadership. We offer that leadership; a leadership to eradicate bitterness and discrimination.
  • We pledge energetic, positive leadership to enforce statutory and constitutional protections to eliminate discrimination.
  • We pledge concern for the unique problems of citizens long disadvantaged in our total society by race, color, national origin, creed, or sex.
  • The plight of American Indians and Eskimos is a national disgrace. Contradictory government policies have led to intolerable deprivation for these citizens. We dedicate ourselves to the promotion of policies responsive to their needs and desires and will seek the full participation of these people and their leaders in the formulation of such policies. Inequality of jobs, of education, of housing and of health blight their lives today. We believe the Indian and Eskimo must have an equal opportunity to participate fully in American society. Moreover, the uniqueness and beauty of these native cultures must be recognized and allowed to flourish.
  • The principles of the 1965 Immigration Act, non-discrimination against national origins, reunification of families, and selective support for the American labor market, have our unreserved backing, We will refine this new law to make our immigration policy still more equitable and non-discriminatory.
  • Our party historically has been the party of freedom. We are the only barricade against those who, through excessive government power, would overwhelm and destroy man's liberty. If liberty fails, all else is dross. Beyond freedom we emphasize trust and credibility. We have pledged only what we honestly believe we can perform. In a world where broken promises become a way of life, we submit that a nation progresses not on promises broken but on pledges kept. We have also accented the moral nature of the crisis which confronts us. At the core of that crisis is the life, the liberty, and the happiness of man. If life can be taken with impunity, if liberty is subtly leeched away, if the pursuit of happiness becomes empty and futile, then indeed are the moral foundations in danger. We have placed high store on our basic theme. The dogmas of the quiet past simply will not do for the restless present. The case is new. We must most urgently think anew and act anew. This is an era of rapid, indeed violent change. Clearly we must dis-enthrall ourselves. Only then can we save this great republic. We rededicate ourselves to this republic; this one nation.
  • We stand for an equitable, non-discriminatory immigration policy, reaffirming our support of the principles of the 1965 Immigration Act. Non-discrimination against national origins, reunification of families, and the selective admission of the specially talented. The immigration process must be just.
  • Strides have been made toward wiping out the last vestiges of racial discrimination. We regard these tasks as never completed, but we are well on the way and pledge ourselves to press forward assuring all men and women in the armed forces rewarding careers.
  • Our ties with Africa are rooted in the heritage of many Americans and in our historic commitment to self-determination. We respect the hard-earned sovereignty of Africa's new states and will continue to do our utmost to make a meaningful contribution to their development. We have no illusions that the United States can single-handedly solve the seemingly intractable problems of apartheid and minority rule, but we can and will encourage non-violent, evolutionary change by supporting international efforts peacefully to resolve the problems of southern Africa and by maintaining our contacts with all.
  • Business, so vital to our economic system, is free enterprise in its purest sense. It holds forth opportunity to the individual, regardless of race or color, to fulfill the American dream. The seedbed of innovation and invention, it is the starting point of many of the country's large businesses, and today its roll in our increasingly technological economy is crucial. We pledge to sustain and expand that role.
  • We have requested Congress to expand the jurisdiction of the Commission on Civil Rights to cover sex discrimination, recommended and supported passage of Title IX of the Higher Education Act opposing discrimination against women in educational institutions, supported the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972 giving the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission enforcement power in sex discrimination cases.
  • Other factors beyond outright employer discrimination, the lack of child care facilities, for example, can limit job opportunities for women.
  • We will work toward ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, appointment of women to highest level positions in the Federal Government, including the Cabinet and Supreme Court, equal pay for equal work, elimination of discrimination against women at all levels in the federal government, elimination of discrimination against women in the criminal justice system, in sentencing, rehabilitation and prison facilities, increased opportunities for the part time employment of women, and expanded training programs for women who want to reenter the labor force, elimination of economic discrimination against women in credit, mortgage, insurance, property, rental and finance contracts. We pledge vigorous enforcement of all Federal statutes and executive orders barring job discrimination on the basis of sex.
  • We deplore what is tantamount to cruel discrimination. Age discrimination in employment, and the discrimination of neglect and indifference, perhaps the cruelest of all.
  • Through our efforts, de jure segregation is virtually ended. We pledge continuation of these efforts until no American schoolchild suffers educational deprivation because of the color of his skin or the language he speaks and all school children are receiving high quality education.
  • Build facilities for disadvantaged children. Further to assure minority progress, we have provided more support to predominantly black colleges than ever before.
  • We will press on with our fight against social injustice and discrimination, building upon the achievements already made. Knowing that none of us can reap the fullest blessings of liberty until all of us can, we reaffirm our commitment to the upward struggle for universal freedom led by Abraham Lincoln a century ago.
  • Our children deserve quality education. We believe that segregated schools are morally wrong and unconstitutional.
  • Our approach is to work to eradicate the root causes of segregated schools, such as housing discrimination and gerrymandered school districts. We must get on with the education of all our children.
  • Roadblocks must be removed that may prevent Americans from realizing their full potential in society. Unfair discrimination is a burden that intolerably weighs morally, economically and politically upon a free nation. While working to eradicate discriminatory practices, every citizen should be encouraged to take pride in and foster the cultural heritage that has been passed on from previous generations. Almost every American traces ancestry from another country; this cultural diversity gives strength to our national heritage. There must be vigorous enforcement of laws to assure equal treatment in job recruitment, hiring, promotion, pay, credit, mortgage access and housing. The way to end discrimination, however, is not by resurrecting the much discredited quota system and attempting to cloak it in an aura of new respectability. Rather, we must provide alternative means of assisting the victims of past discrimination to realize their full worth as American citizens. Wiping out past discrimination requires continued emphasis on providing educational opportunities for minority citizens, increasing direct and guaranteed loans to minority business enterprises, and affording qualified minority persons equal opportunities for government positions at all levels.
  • Women, who comprise a numerical majority of the population, have been denied a just portion of our nation's rights and opportunities. We reaffirm our pledge to work to eliminate discrimination in all areas for reasons of race, color, national origin, age, creed or sex and to enforce vigorously laws guaranteeing women equal rights. The Republican Party reaffirms its support for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Our party was the first national party to endorse the ERA in 1940. We continue to believe its ratification is essential to insure equal rights for all Americans.
  • When language is a cause of discrimination, there must be an intensive educational effort to enable Spanish-speaking students to become fully proficient in English, while maintaining their own language and cultural heritage.
  • Handicapped persons must be admitted into the mainstream of our society. Too often the handicapped population of the nation—over 30 million men, women and children—has been denied the rights taken for granted by other citizens. Time after time, the paths are closed to the handicapped in education, employment, transportation, health care, housing, recreation, insurance, polling booths and due process of law. National involvement is necessary to correct discrimination in these areas.
  • We oppose discrimination in housing, whether by individuals or by institutional financing polices.
  • The criminal justice system must be more vigilant in preventing rape, eliminating discrimination against the victim, and dealing with the offenders.
  • Among the rights that are the entitlement of every American worker is the right to join a union, large, small, or independent, the right to be protected against racial discrimination.
  • The United States has always supported the process of self-determination in Africa. Our friendship for the African countries is expressed in support for continued peaceful economic development, expansion of trade, humanitarian relief efforts and our belief that the entire continent should be free from outside military intervention. Millions of Americans recognize their historical and cultural ties with Africa and express their desire that United States policy toward Africa is a matter of great importance. We support all forces which promote negotiated settlements and racial peace. We shall continue to deplore all violence and terrorism and to urge all concerned that the rights of tribal, ethnic, and racial minorities be guaranteed through workable safeguards. Our policy is to strengthen the forces of moderation recognizing that solutions to African problems will not come quickly. The peoples of Africa can coexist in security, work together in freedom and harmony, and strive together to secure their prosperity. We hope that the Organization of African Unity will be able to achieve mature and stable relationships within Africa and abroad. The interests of peace and security in Africa are best served by the absence of arms and greater concentration on peaceful development. We reserve the right to maintain the balance by extending our support to nations facing a threat.
  • Arts and humanities offer an opportunity for every American to become a participant in activities that add fullness, expression, challenge and joy to our daily lives. We Republicans consider the preservation of the rich cultural heritages of our various ethnic groups as a priority goal.
  • It has long been a fundamental conviction of the Republican Party that government should foster in our society a climate of maximum individual liberty and freedom of choice. Properly informed, our people as individuals or acting through instruments of popular consultation can make the right decisions affecting personal or general welfare, free of pervasive and heavy-handed intrusion by the central government into the decision-making process. This tenet is the genius of representative democracy. Republicans also treasure the ethnic, cultural, and regional diversity of our people. This diversity fosters a dynamism in American society that is the envy of the world.
  • As the 'Party of Lincoln', we remain equally and steadfastly committed to the equality of rights for all citizens, regardless of race. Although this nation has not yet eliminated all vestiges of racism over the years we are heartened by the progress that has been made, we are proud of the role that our party has played, and we are dedicated to standing shoulder to shoulder with black Americans in that cause.
  • Through long association with government programs, the word 'welfare' has come to be perceived almost exclusively as tax-supported aid to the needy. But in its most inclusive sense—and as Americans understood it from the beginning of the Republic—such aid also encompasses those charitable works performed by private citizens, families, and social, ethnic, and religious organizations. Policies of the federal government leading to high taxes, rising inflation, and bureaucratic empire-building have made it difficult and often impossible for such individuals and groups to exercise their charitable instincts. We believe that government policies that fight inflation, reduce tax rates, and end bureaucratic excesses can help make private effort by the American people once again a major force in those works of charity which are the true signs of a progressive and humane society
  • No individual should be victimized by unfair discrimination because of race, sex, advanced age, physical handicap, difference of national origin or religion, or economic circumstance.
  • The Republican Party supports the principle and process of self-determination in Africa. We reaffirm our commitment to this principle.
  • We recognize that much is at stake in Africa and that the United States and the industrial west have vital interests there, economically, strategically, and politically. Working closely with our allies, a Republican administration will seek to assist the countries of Africa with our presence, our markets, our know-how, and our investment. We will work to create a climate of economic and political development and confidence. We will encourage and assist business to play a major role in support of regional industrial development programs, mineral complexes, and agricultural self-sufficiency. Republicans believe that African nations, if given a choice, will reject the Marxist, totalitarian model being forcibly imposed.
  • The African peoples are convinced that the west is central to world stability and economic growth on which their own fortunes ultimately depend. A Republican administration will adhere to policies that reflect the complex origins of African conflicts, demonstrate that we know what U.S. interests are, and back those interests in meaningful ways. We will recognize the important role of economic and military assistance programs and will devote major resources to assisting African development and stability when such aid is given on a bilateral basis and contributes directly to American interests on the continent. In southern Africa, American policies must be guided by common sense and by our own humanitarian principles. Republicans believe that our history has meaning for Africa in demonstrating that a multi-racial society with guarantees of individual rights is possible and can work. We must remain open and helpful to all parties, whether in the new Zimbabwe, in Namibia, or in the Republic of South Africa. A Republican administration will not endorse situations or constitutions, in whatever society, which are racist in purpose or in effect. It will not expect miracles, but will press for genuine progress in achieving goals consistent with American ideals.
  • The Republican Party reaffirms its support of the pluralism and freedom that have been part and parcel of this great country. In so doing, it repudiates and completely disassociates itself from people, organizations, publications, and entities which promulgate the practice of any form of bigotry, racism, antisemitism, or religious intolerance.
  • Americans demand a civil rights policy premised on the letter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law requires equal rights; and it is our policy to end discrimination on account of sex, race, color, creed, or national origin. We have vigorously enforced civil rights statutes. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has recovered record amounts of back pay and other compensation for victims of employment discrimination. Just as we must guarantee opportunity, we oppose attempts to dictate results. We will resist efforts to replace equal rights with discriminatory quota systems and preferential treatment. Quotas are the most insidious form of discrimination: reverse discrimination against the innocent. We must always remember that, in a free society, different individual goals will yield different results. The Republican Party has an historic commitment to equal rights for women. Republicans pioneered the right of women to vote, and our party was the first major party to advocate equal pay for equal work, regardless of sex.
  • We will continue to actively seek the elimination of discrimination against homemakers with regard to Individual Retirement Accounts so that single-income couples can invest the same amount in IRAs as two-income couples.
  • We are committed to enforcing statutory prohibitions barring discrimination against any otherwise qualified handicapped individuals, in any program receiving federal financial assistance, solely by reason of their handicap.
  • Our history is a story about immigrants. We are proud that America still symbolizes hope and promise to the world. We have shown unparalleled generosity to the persecuted and to those seeking a better life. In return, they have helped to make a great land greater still.
  • We are committed to democracy in Africa and to the economic development that will help it flourish. That is why we will foster free-market, growth-oriented, and liberalized trading policies. As part of reforming the policies of the International Development Association, we have assisted in directing a larger proportion of its resources to sub-Saharan Africa. To nurture the spirit of individual initiative in Africa, our newly created African Development Foundation will work with African entrepreneurs at the village level. In addition, through our rejection of the austerity programs of international organizations, we are bringing new hope to the people of Africa that they will join in the benefits of the growing, dynamic world economy. We will continue to provide necessary security and economic assistance to African nations with which we maintain good relations to help them develop the infrastructure of democratic capitalism so essential to economic growth and individual accomplishment. We will encourage our allies in Europe and east Asia to coordinate their assistance efforts so that the industrialized countries will be able to contribute effectively to the economic development of the continent. We believe that, if given the choice, the nations of Africa will reject the model of Marxist state-controlled economies in favor of the prosperity and quality of life that free economies and free people can achieve. We will continue to assist threatened African governments to protect themselves and will work with them to protect their continent from subversion and to safeguard their strategic minerals.
  • We reaffirm our commitment to the rights of all South Africans. Apartheid is repugnant. In South Africa, as elsewhere on the continent, we support well-conceived efforts to foster peace, prosperity, and stability.
  • Since its inception, the Republican Party has stood for the worth of every person. On that ground, we support the pluralism and diversity that have been part of our country's greatness. Deep in our hearts, we do believe that bigotry has no place in American life. We denounce those persons, organizations, publications, and movements which practice or promote racism, antisemitism or religious intolerance.
  • A free economy helps defeat discrimination by fostering opportunity for all. That's why real income for black families has risen fourteen percent since 1982. It's why members of minority groups have been gaining jobs in the Republican recovery twice as fast as everyone else. Upward mobility for all Americans has come back strong. We are the party of real social progress. Republicans welcome the millions of forward-looking Americans who want an 'opportunity society', not a welfare state. We believe our country's greatest resource is its people; all its people. Their ingenuity and imagination are needed to make the most of our common future.
  • We will strongly enforce statutory prohibitions barring discrimination because of handicap in any program receiving federal financial assistance.
  • We share a deep concern for peace and justice in Northern Ireland and condemn all violence and terrorism in that strife-torn land. We support the process of peace and reconciliation established by the Anglo-Irish Agreement, and we encourage new investment and economic reconstruction in Northern Ireland on the basis of strict equality of opportunity and non-discrimination in employment.
  • Republicans are committed to providing assistance for refugees fleeing Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Republicans strongly believe that the promise of asylum for these refugees must be met by adequate resources and vigorous administration of refugee programs. We will increase efforts to resettle Vietnamese refugees under the orderly departure program. We are particularly committed to assisting the resettlement of Amerasian children against whom brutal discrimination is practiced.
  • The recent African drought and resulting famine were not just natural disasters. They were made worse by poorly conceived development projects which stripped lands of their productive capacity. Republicans recognize that protecting the natural resource base of developing nations is essential to protecting future economic opportunities and assuring stable societies. We are leading the fight worldwide to require sound environmental planning as part of foreign development programs. We believe that peace in southern Africa can best be achieved by the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Angola, complete independence and self-determination for the people of Namibia, a rapid process of internal reconciliation, and free and fair elections in both places.
  • While obstacles remain, we are closer than ever to a comprehensive settlement of these interrelated conflicts. America's strong support for Angolan freedom-fighters has helped make this progress possible. We also oppose the maintenance of communist forces and influence in Mozambique. Republicans deplore the apartheid system of South Africa and consider it morally repugnant. All who value human liberty understand the evil of apartheid, and we will not rest until apartheid is eliminated from South Africa. That will remain our goal. Republicans call for an effective and coordinated policy that will promote equal rights and a peaceful transition to a truly representative constitutional form of government for all South Africans and the citizens of all nations throughout Africa. We deplore violence employed against innocent blacks and whites from whatever source. We believe firmly that one element in the evolution of black political progress must be black economic progress; actions designed to pressure the government of South Africa must not have the effect of adversely affecting the rising aspirations and achievements of black South African entrepreneurs and workers and their families. We should also encourage the development of strong democratic black political institutions to aid in the peaceful transition to majority rule. Republicans believe that it is wrong to punish innocent black South Africans for the policies of the apartheid government of South Africa.
  • Abraham Lincoln, our first Republican president, expressed the philosophy that inspires Republicans to this day, 'The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all, or cannot so well do, for themselves in their separate and individual capacities. But in all that people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere'. We believe that most problems of human making are within the capacity of human ingenuity to solve. For good reason, millions of new Americans have flocked to our shores. America has always been an opportunity society. Republicans have always believed that economic prosperity comes from individual enterprise, not government programs. We have defended our core principles for 138 years; but never has this country, and the world, been so receptive to our message.
  • The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizes an epochal change in the way people live. More important, it liberates the way people think. We see with new clarity that centralized government bureaucracies created in this century are not the wave of the future. Never again will people trust planners and paper shufflers more than they trust themselves. We all watched as the statue of Soviet hangman Feliks Dzherzhinsky was toppled in front of Moscow's KGB headquarters by the very people his evil empire sought to enslave. Its sightless eyes symbolized the moral blindness of totalitarians around the world. They could never see the indomitable spirit of people determined to be free from government control—free to build a better future with their own heads, hands, and hearts. We Republicans saw clearly the dangers of collectivism: not only the military threat, but the deeper threat to the souls of people bound in dependence. Here at home, we warned against Big Government, because we knew concentrated decision-making, no matter how well-intentioned, was a danger to liberty and prosperity. Republicans stood at the rampart of freedom, defending the individual against the domineering state. While we did not always prevail, we always stood our ground, faithful to our principles and confident of history's ultimate verdict.
  • The protection of individual rights is the foundation for opportunity and security. The Republican Party is unique in this regard. Since its inception, it has respected every person, even when that proposition was not universally popular. Today, as in the day of Lincoln, we insist that no American's rights are negotiable. That is why we declare that bigotry and prejudice have no place in American life. We denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, or religious intolerance.
  • We urge peace and justice for Northern Ireland. We welcome the newly begun process of constitutional dialogue that holds so much promise. We encourage investment and reconstruction to create opportunity for all.
  • The diversity of our nation is reflected in this platform. We ask for the support and participation of all who substantially share our agenda. In one way or another, every Republican is a dissenter. At the same time, we are not morally indifferent. In this, as in many things, Lincoln is our model. At a time of great crisis, he spoke both words of healing and words of conviction. We do likewise, not for the peace of a political party, but because we citizens are bound together in a great enterprise.
  • We are the party of individual Americans, whose rights we protect and defend as the foundation for opportunity and security for all. Today, as at our founding in the day of Lincoln, we insist no one's rights are negotiable. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the divisive issues of our time, we call on all Republicans and all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance.
  • Because we are all one America, we oppose discrimination. We believe in the equality of all people before the law and that individuals should be judged by their ability rather than their race.
  • We reaffirm the Republican Party's historic commitment to agricultural progress through research and education, starting with the system of land grant colleges established in 1862. For the new century, as in the days of Lincoln, farming must look ahead to innovation and constant improvement, especially biotechnology and precision farming techniques.
  • The sole source of equal opportunity for all is equality before the law. Therefore, we oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, creed, or national origin, and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes.
  • We meet at a remarkable time in the life of our country. Our powerful economy gives America a unique chance to confront persistent challenges. Our country, after an era of drift, must now set itself to important tasks and higher goals. The Republican Party has the vision and leadership to address these issues. Our platform is uplifting and visionary. It reflects the views of countless Americans all across this country who believe in prosperity with a purpose.
  • Since the election of 1860, the Republican Party has had a special calling, to advance the founding principles of freedom and limited government and the dignity and worth of every individual.
  • Equality of individuals before the law has always been a cornerstone of our party. We therefore oppose discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin and will vigorously enforce anti-discrimination statutes. As we strive to forge a national consensus on the crucial issues of our time, we call on all Americans to reject the forces of hatred and bigotry. Accordingly, we denounce all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, and religious intolerance. Our country was founded in faith and upon the truth that self-government is rooted.
  • Rule of law is not consistent with state-sponsored brutality. When the Russian government attacks civilians in Chechnya, killing innocents without discrimination or accountability, neglecting orphans and refugees, it can no longer expect aid from international lending institutions. Moscow needs to operate with civilized self-restraint.
  • One hundred and fifty years ago, Americans who had gathered to protest the expansion of slavery gave birth to a political party that would save the Union. The Republican Party. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois carried the Republican banner in the presidential election and was elected the party's first president. He became our nation's greatest leader, and one of our party's greatest heroes. Every day, we strive to fulfill Lincoln's vision, a country united and free, in which all people are guaranteed equal rights and the opportunity to pursue their dreams. His legacy goes beyond the borders of America. It can be seen in free governments all over the world. Lincoln's successors have been united by a common purpose, defending freedom at home and promoting it abroad. Today, the Republican Party gathers to renominate a man who carries on the best traditions of our party by carrying the banner of freedom.
  • Our nation is a land of opportunity for all, and our communities must represent the ideal of equality and justice for every citizen. The Republican Party favors aggressive, proactive measures to ensure that no individual is discriminated against on the basis of race, national origin, gender, or other characteristics covered by our civil rights laws. We also favor recruitment and outreach policies that cast the widest possible net so that the best qualified individuals are encouraged to apply for jobs, contracts, and university admissions. We believe in the principle of affirmative access – taking steps to ensure that disadvantaged individuals of all colors and ethnic backgrounds have the opportunity to compete economically and that no child is left behind educationally.
  • Because we are opposed to discrimination, we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides based on skin color, ethnicity, or gender, which perpetuate divisions and can lead people to question the accomplishments of successful minorities and women.
  • As the party of Lincoln, we stand for freedom. We stand for the freedom of families and individuals to have good schools, good health care, and affordable housing and services. We stand for the freedom that comes with a good paying job in a growing economy. We stand for the freedom and dignity of every human life..
  • We uphold the right of individual Americans to own firearms, a right which antedated the constitution and was solemnly confirmed by the Second Amendment. We applaud the Supreme Court's decision in Heller affirming that right, and we assert the individual responsibility to safely use and store firearms. We call on the next president to appoint judges who will similarly respect the constitution. Gun ownership is responsible citizenship, enabling Americans to defend themselves, their property, and communities. We call for education in constitutional rights in schools, and we support the option of firearms training in federal programs serving senior citizens and women. We urge immediate action to review the automatic denial of gun ownership to returning members of the armed forces who have suffered trauma during service to their country. We condemn frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, which are transparent attempts to deprive citizens of their rights. We oppose federal licensing of law-abiding gun owners and national gun registration as violations of the Second Amendment. We recognize that gun control only affects and penalizes law-abiding citizens, and that such proposals are ineffective at reducing violent crime.
  • Individual rights, and the responsibilities that go with them, are the foundation of a free society. From the time of Lincoln, equality of individuals has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party. Our commitment to equal opportunity extends from landmark school-choice legislation for the students of Washington, D.C. to historic appointments at the highest levels of government. We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, and we will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes. We ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance. As a matter of principle, Republicans oppose any attempts to create race-based governments within the United States, as well as any domestic governments not bound by the constitution or the Bill of Rights. Precisely because we oppose discrimination, we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides, whether in education or in corporate boardrooms. The government should not make contracts on this basis, and neither should corporations.
  • Free speech on college campuses is to be celebrated, but there should be no place in academia for antisemitism or racism of any kind.
  • All Americans stand equal before the law. We embrace the principle that all Americans should be treated with respect and dignity. In the spirit of the constitution, we consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin unacceptable and immoral. We will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes and ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism, antisemitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance.
  • We call for legislation to ban sex-selective abortions; gender discrimination in its most lethal form.
  • The Republican Party includes Americans from every faith and tradition, and our policies and positions respect the right of every American to follow his or her beliefs and underscore our reverence for the religious freedom envisioned by the founding fathers of our nation and of our party. As a matter of principle, we oppose the creation of any new race-based governments within the United States.
  • Today's education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations.
  • Public authorities must regain control of their correctional institutions, for we cannot allow prisons to become ethnic or racial battlegrounds. Persons jailed for whatever cause should be protected against cruel or degrading treatment by other inmates.
  • Our wounded warriors, whether still in service or discharged, deserve the best medical care our country can provide. The nature of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in an unprecedented incidence of traumatic brain injury, loss of limbs, and post-traumatic stress disorder which calls for a new commitment of resources and personnel for its treatment and care to promote recovery. We must make military and veterans' medicine the gold standard for mental health care, advances in prosthetics, and treatment of trauma and eye injuries. We must heed Abraham Lincoln's command 'to care for him who bore the battle'. To care, as well, for the families of those who have made the ultimate sacrifice, who must be assured of meaningful financial assistance, remains our solemn duty.
  • As we approach the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued by the first Republican President Abraham Lincoln, we are reminded to be vigilant against human bondage in whatever form it appears. We will use the full force of the law against those who engage in modern-day forms of slavery, including the commercial sexual exploitation of children and the forced labor of men, women, and children.
  • Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Johnson, who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Dirksen was instrumental to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing.
  • Democrats first used brutality and discriminatory laws to stop blacks from voting for Republicans. Democrats today use deception and government handouts to keep blacks from voting for Republicans. The dismal record of Democrat leaders in black communities is causing a shift in party identification among black Americans.
  • As a result of unrelenting efforts by Democrats to shift their racist past onto the backs of Republicans, using the mantra, 'the parties switched sides', a lot of people have requested an article addressing this issue. It does not make sense to believe that racist Democrats suddenly rushed into the Republican Party, especially after Republicans spent nearly 150 years fighting for black civil rights. In fact, the racist Democrats declared they would rather vote for a 'yellow dog' than a Republican because the Republican Party was known as the party for blacks.
  • We are hearing how Republicans and conservatives are either the party of racists or that they are racists in general, but history proves a different story. This rhetoric is being pushed by those on the left and is being used as a tool to divide people. The real history is no longer taught to our children and so many adults have fallen prey to this rhetoric without actually doing the research to see if it is actually true. If you look though the history books that are presented to our children. If you listen to politicians and pundits. If you talk to your neighbors or friends. Most, would not even believe many facts of the lost history in the Civil Rights Movement. This is a travesty of truth, and the people that have been most afflicted by this have been the African American community for not really understanding the truth about the Democrat party and how they have buried the truth about their past.
  • In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over eighty percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.
  • In order to break the racist ways of southern Democrats, it was Republican President Eisenhower who sponsored both Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act and it was an LBJ-led senate who fought tooth and nail against them. Ike finally signed a watered down Civil Rights Bill.
  • In the mad dash to vilify the Republicans and conservatives today, many have forgotten the fact that it was the Republican Party that was the champion of civil rights and freedom for African Americans. Today that story goes either untold or when it is told, those that do so are immediately under attack and accused of being a racist. Many today would like you to believe that just because conservatives would rather assist in moving people off the rolls of welfare or any number of assistance programs, we do not care about those that have been conditioned to be dependent on those programs, and that is one of the most fatal mistakes that progressives make. Conservatives understand that people need assistance, but we also understand that it cannot become a lifestyle, that is passed down to generations to come.
  • Republicans want your rights. Whereas Democrats believe in the power of government to take from the rich and give to the poor, Republicans believe in the power of government to make you virtuous. Although Republicans properly complain about 'social engineering' when the Democrats try it to produce 'equitable distribution of income' and other socialistic goals, Republicans are equally willing to use social engineering for their own goals of producing the virtuous and God-fearing normalcy that Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, and Bill Bennett want. Although Republicans properly accuse the Democrats of seeking unconstitutional power for the federal government when the Democrats want it to spend more money and control businesses and private property, the Republicans also seek unconstitutional federal power for their 'law and order' issues. They see nothing wrong with voiding the Bill of Rights through unconstitutional searches, seizures, and confiscations in the pursuit of their unconstitutional moralistic drug prohibitions. Although Republicans properly accuse the Democrats, and the courts, of completely dismissing the Tenth Amendment, which limits federal power, Republicans completely dismiss the Ninth Amendment, which states, 'The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people'. When it comes to the right to privacy, which has been used to strike down laws about sexual practices, birth control, and abortion, Republicans consistently 'deny' and 'disparage' that right because it is not enumerated in the constitution. Republicans believe that private virtue is the foundation of private success and achievement. If that is true, which it is, why do they need coercive and draconian laws to enforce private virtue? If the wages of sin is death, or the wages of vice is failure, then the most edifying lesson for all is to see the failures happen, not to prevent them (and many other innocent or useful pastimes) from happening.
  • Hummel seems to take Lincoln at his word that he would free no slaves in order to save the Union. However, no 'Fire Eaters' in the south believed that kind of thing for a minute; and it is their suspicion that drove events. South Carolina and the original seven Confederate States left the Union in order to preserve slavery, pure and simple. They would not live under a regime dominated by a Party dedicated to ending slavery, just as earlier abolitionists did not want to live under a regime, though they did anyway, that tolerated slavery. The border states that subsequently seceded, like Virginia and Tennessee, did so more on the constitutional principle that force should not be used to prevent secession–though even that principle, curiously, only appealed to slave states with a sufficiently dominant slave holder political faction. Since Lincoln subsequently issued the Emancipation Proclamation at very nearly the first political opportunity to do so, we might suspect too that he was more than willing to 'save the Union' as a means to freeing the slaves.
  • The left makes a big show of disliking the police, and I think that they do dislike actual policemen; but the existence of the police is absolutely essential to the leftist vision of political life. The SWAT teams that break into your house in the middle of the night, with a no-knock warrant, and shoot your dog, and perhaps you as well, are authorized, not just by Republican drug warriors, but by Democrat drug warriors and Democrat congresses also.
  • Not only do Republicans often lack the courage of their convictions, but they are often so disloyal that their collaboration with Democrats serves to directly maintain Democrat power.
  • Herman Cain, as a successful, articulate, and aggressive black businessman, deeply frightened the Democrats. From their bag of tricks they produced the sort of thing familiar from the treatment of Clarence Thomas, namely old charges of sexual harassment. Having hanged black men during Segregation, often for bogus rape charges, Democrats now are content to smear their political prospects with harassment charges.
  • Republicans were therefore faced with the unenviable choice between Constitutional Government and their own conservative, paternalistic desire, so clear with alcohol Prohibition, to protect people from their own vices. Their choice, of course, has almost universally been to go along, as in so many other things, with the Democrats, scrap the Constitution, and take credit for drug prohibition
  • In such a situation, where a wrong is inflicted and justice denied, South Carolina had a right to either violent or non-violent resistance. Secession would be a form of violent resistance, and so justified. However, in 1860 South Carolina was not afraid of injustice, but of justice. Despite what some now say, it was not the continuing problem of tariffs that pushed the 'fire-eaters' over the edge. It was the 'Black Republicans'. While persons have the right to exercise their rights, like voluntary association, for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reasons, no one has the right to any action whose purpose is to perpetuate crime and escape from justice. Southern slave owners, although we may say, as Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman actually did, that they were acting in good faith, nevertheless were engaged in one of the most vile businesses of human history. Even worse, they were justifying it with a pure racism that served to all but completely dehumanize their African bondsmen. This became one of the worst poisons in American history. It had already infected Constitutional Law through the Dred Scott decision, which held that no black person was a citizen of the United States or had any rights that need be recognized by white people. This monstrous doctrine did not end with the Civil War. Even when the slaves were free, and their rights enshrined in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Southern die-hards, given a free hand by the withdrawal of Federal forces in 1877, created regimes of Jim Crow and Segregation that disenfranchised, terrorized, and oppressed black people for another century.

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  • Responsible scholars recognize the persistence and depth of racism among white northerners during the Civil War period. It's a key component in constructing the narrative of the sectional crisis, the war, and Reconstruction. One of the reasons Lincoln hesitated in issuing a proclamation of emancipation was because he knew it would arouse opposition in the free north among Democrats. None of that, however, has anything to do with the centrality of slavery in southern society or the reasons why secessionists advocated separation and independence, to protect slavery from the threat posed by Lincoln's election and the long term implications of the Republican triumph in 1860. Moreover, pointing to the existence of northern racism does not make it disappear from southern society. Nor does it necessarily follow that because in 1861 most white northerners did not support going to war to destroy slavery, let alone to secure black equality, that white southerners did not go to war to protect a society and a way of life that was ultimately grounded upon and supported by the enslavement of several million human beings. To deny that is to deny historical reality.
  • 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'.
  • Black folks in America are telling one party, 'We don’t give a damn about you'. They're telling the other party 'You’ve got our vote'. Therefore, you have labeled yourself 'disenfranchised' because one party knows they've got you under their thumb. The other party knows they'll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.
  • In meetings, I've heard Republicans say to me that black people are Republicans, they just don't know it yet. I don't need you to tell me I'm conservative because I go to church. What I like about Rand Paul is that he doesn't make that presumption. He has taken affirmative steps to become more aware of how black people view certain issues. But he has been forthright about what he is willing and capable of doing.
  • This war against women started a long time ago with old Democrats who took over the Republican Party, which was, before that, the very first to support the Equal Rights Amendment. Even when the National Women's Political Caucus started, there was a whole Republican feminist entity. But beginning with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, right-wing Democrats like Jesse Helms began to leave the Democratic Party and gradually take over the GOP. So I always feel I have to apologize to my friends who are Republicans because they've basically lost their party. Ronald Reagan couldn't get nominated today because he was supportive of immigrant rights. Barry Goldwater was pro-choice. George H.W. Bush supported Planned Parenthood. No previous Republicans except for George W. Bush would be acceptable to the people who now run the GOP. They are not Republicans. They are the American version of the Taliban.
  • They've taken over one of our two great parties. This causes people to wrongly think that the country is equally divided but if we look at the public opinion polls, it isn't. So, I can't think of anything more crucial than real Republicans taking back the GOP.
  • I think feminists and progressive Democrats err when they accusingly say to Republican women, 'How can you be a Republican?' Nobody responds to that. But if you say, 'Look, you didn't leave your party. The party left you'. Let's just look at the issues and see what they are and forget about party labels and vote for ourselves', I think people would really respond.
  • I was 'born' into the Democrat party, most of my family members are Democrats! It was not until later on, after I joined the military, and was out on my own in the real world, that I began to hear things about the Republican Party and began to research who was actually for the black community, ending slavery, and the civil rights movement and who was not. I think it is very important that people expose themselves to and know accurate history, not just the stuff that you have been spoon fed from the left, other family members, and friends. If people would educate themselves, this country wouldn't be going down the drain so fast! I hope you enjoy the article and please share this with any and every liberal friend, black, white or any race, that you may have, so they might have a chance to learn accurate history and educate themselves as well!
  • 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.

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  • We favor strengthening our common American identity and loyalty, which includes the contribution and assimilation of different racial and ethnic groups.
  • 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'.
  • Democrats by a kind of tortured reasoning, sometimes accused Negroes and Republicans of attacking each other so that the crimes would be blamed on the Democrats; investigations revealed that Democrats had committed the acts themselves.

W

  • I never use the words Democrats and Republicans. It's liberals and Americans.
    • James G. Watt, in a statement of November 1981, quoted in New York Times (10 October 1983); also quoted in Energy and Environment : The Unfinished Business (1986) by Congressional Quarterly, Inc., p. 91
  • I was a little bit skeptical based on some things I've heard and I've seen from other Republicans. I wanted someone to pick up on that Jack Kemp model and I wanted him to understand that it's the justice issues, or the injustice, that keep black people from voting Republican. He has listened and learned and has been able to take on things that most Republicans would be afraid of.
  • On March 20, 1854, the Republican Party was established in Ripon, Wisconsin. Referred to as the 'GOP' or 'Grand Old Party', it established for one reason, to break the chains of slavery and ensure the unalienable rights endowed by the Creator of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness would be for all Americans. The Republican Party was created to achieve individual freedom. Then, as now, the antagonist to the Republican Party has been the Democrats, the party of collective subjugation and individual enslavement, then physical, now economic.
  • The antagonist to the Republican Party has been the Democrats, the party of collective subjugation and individual enslavement. Then physical, now economic. The first black members of the U.S. House and Senate were Republicans. The first civil rights legislation came from Republicans. Democrats gave us the KKK, Jim Crow, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and failed policies like the 'Great Society'. Republican President Eisenhower ordered troops to enforce school desegregation. Republican Senator Everett Dirksen enabled the 1964 civil rights legislation to pass, in opposition to Democrat Senators Robert Byrd, a KKK Grand Wizard, and Al Gore, Sr.
  • Who are the real racists? So far, thanks to a Republican Party that is ignorant of its own history and gave up on the black community, Democrats have fifty of those two hundred years under their belt. The problem with today's Republican Party is that it has forgotten its own history and raison d'etre. Individual liberty. The party must come to realize that GOP also stands for 'Growth, Opportunity, Prosperity' and articulate how it stands, as its history and founding clearly demonstrate, for the individual pursuit of happiness as opposed to the progressive socialist Democrat lie of a collective guarantee of happiness. So, happy 160th birthday to my party, the Republican Party. I am a strong conservative and I hope Republicans recommit to those fundamental principles which established this party, the historical antithesis of the Democrats.
  • Worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow 'switched places' vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century. Republicans may not be able to make significant inroads among black voters in the coming elections, but they would do well to demolish this myth nonetheless.
  • Southerners who defected from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and thereafter did so to join a Republican Party that was far more enlightened on racial issues than were the Democrats of the era, and had been for a century. There is no radical break in the Republicans' civil rights history. From abolition to Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1875 to the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964, there exists a line that is by no means perfectly straight or unwavering but that nonetheless connects the politics of Lincoln with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower. And from slavery and secession to remorseless opposition to everything from Reconstruction to the anti-lynching laws, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960, there exists a similarly identifiable line connecting John Calhoun and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Supporting civil-rights reform was not a radical turnaround for congressional Republicans in 1964, but it was a radical turnaround for Johnson and the Democrats.
  • The Republican platform in 1964 was hardly catnip for Klansmen. It spoke of the Johnson administration's failure to help further the 'just aspirations of the minority groups' and blasted the president for his refusal 'to apply Republican-initiated retraining programs where most needed, particularly where they could afford new economic opportunities to Negro citizens'. Other planks in the platform included, 'improvements of civil rights statutes adequate to changing needs of our times; such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex'. And Goldwater's fellow Republicans ran on a 1964 platform demanding 'full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes, to assure equal rights and opportunities guaranteed by the Constitution to every citizen'. Some dog whistle.
  • The legislative record, the evolution of the electorate, the party platforms, the keynote speeches, none of them suggests a party-wide Republican about-face on civil rights. Neither does the history of the black vote. While Republican affiliation was beginning to grow in the south in the late 1930s, the GOP also lost its lock on black voters in the north, among whom the New Deal was extraordinarily popular. By 1940, Democrats for the first time won a majority of black votes in the north. This development was not lost on Lyndon Johnson, who crafted his Great Society with the goal of exploiting widespread dependency for the benefit of the Democratic Party.
  • In many cases segregationist Democrats were thrown out by southern voters in favor of civil-rights Republicans. One of the loudest Democratic segregationists in the House was Texas' John Dowdy.
  • It was in fact not until 1995 that Republicans represented a majority of the southern congressional delegation, and they had hardly spent the Reagan years campaigning on the resurrection of Jim Crow. It was not the Civil War but the Cold War that shaped mid-century partisan politics. Eisenhower warned the country against the 'military-industrial complex', but in truth Ike's ascent had represented the decisive victory of the interventionist, hawkish wing of the Republican Party.
  • The Republican party had long been staunchly anti-Communist, but the post-war era saw that anti-Communism energized and looking for monsters to slay, both abroad — in the form of the Soviet Union and its satellites, and at home, in the form of the growing welfare state, the 'creeping socialism' conservatives dreaded. By the middle 1960s, the semi-revolutionary left was the liveliest current in U.S. politics, and Republicans' unapologetic anti-Communism, especially conservatives' rhetoric connecting international socialism abroad with the welfare state at home — left the Left with nowhere to go but the Democratic party. Vietnam was Johnson’s war, but by 1968 the Democratic party was not his alone.
  • Republican ascendancy in Dixie is associated with the rise of the southern middle class, the increasingly trenchant conservative critique of communism and the welfare state, the Vietnam controversy and the rise of the counter-culture, law-and-order concerns rooted in the urban chaos that ran rampant from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, and the incorporation of the radical left into the Democratic Party. Individual events, especially the freak show that was the 1968 Democratic convention, helped solidify conservatives' affiliation with the Republican party. Democrats might argue that some of these concerns, especially welfare and crime, are 'dog whistles' or 'code' for race and racism, but this criticism is shallow in light of the evidence and the real saliency of those issues among U.S. voters of all backgrounds and both parties for decades. Indeed, Democrats who argue that the best policies for black Americans are those that are soft on crime and generous with welfare are engaged in much the same sort of cynical racial calculation President Johnson was practicing when he informed skeptical southern governors that his plan for the Great Society was 'to have them niggers voting Democratic for the next two hundred years'. Johnson's crude racism is, happily, largely a relic of the past, but his strategy endures.
  • 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.
  • 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
  • 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?
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