Grover Norquist

Grover Norquist, 2011

Grover Glenn Norquist (born October 19, 1956) is an American political activist and tax reduction advocate who is founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, an organization that opposes all tax increases. A Republican, he is the primary promoter of the Taxpayer Protection Pledge, a pledge signed by lawmakers who agree to oppose increases in marginal income tax rates for individuals and businesses, as well as net reductions or eliminations of deductions and credits without a matching reduced tax rate.

Quotes

2000s

• I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.
  • Interview on NPR's Morning Edition, May 25, 2001

• Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.
  • interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.

• Our goal is to inflict pain. It is not good enough to win; it has to be a painful and devastating defeat. We're sending a message here. It is like when the king would take his opponent's head and spike it on a pole for everyone to see.
  • from the National Review, quoted in The Republican Noise Machine by David Brock, Crown Publishers 2004, pg. 50

• Alexander Hamilton has been on the $10 since 1928, he's been well honored by the country, he was a great Secretary of the Treasury. But of all the people on the currency, the only one who isn't a president." [Note: Benjamin Franklin, whose portrait appears on the $100 bill, also was not a president.]
  • interview with CNN's Judy Woodruff on the possibility of putting Ronald Reagan on the $10 bill, June 8, 2004

• And we've had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952--Great Depression, New Deal, World War II--Social Security, the draft--all that stuff. That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die. So 8 million people from that age cohort have passed away since the last election; that means, net, maybe 1 million Democrats have disappeared--and even the Republicans in that age group. [...] You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American. Very unusual for America. The reaction to Great Depression, World War II, and so on: Centralization--not as much centralization as the rest of the world got, but much more than is usual in America. We've spent a lot of time dismantling some of that and moving away from that level of regimentation: getting rid of the draft.
  • Grover Norquist cited in in "Did the antitax activist tell a Spanish newspaper that the Greatest Generation was "anti-American"? Sort of.", at weeklystandard.com, 28 September, 2004

• [Democrats] will only become acceptable once they are comfortable in their minority status. Any farmer will tell you that certain animals run around and are unpleasant, but when they've been fixed, then they are happy and sedate.
  • Grover Norquist cited in "The Great Revulsion" at nytimes.com, 10 November, 2006

2010s

• The president was committed; elected on the basis that he was not Romney and Romney was a poopy head."
  • Grover Norquist cited in Obama Won by Convincing Voters Romney Was a "Poopy Head." at www.slate.com, (12 November 2012): Referring to the outcome to of the 2012 US Presidential elections

• An armed people are a free people. If our forefathers were not armed before the American Revolution we would all be speaking English today.
  • Grover Norquist via Twitter, 02 Jan 2016, 23:12 UTC. [1].