Quotes By Karl Rove

At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views of the world.

Negative politics have always been around.

I think wealthy conservatives are busy investing in profit and job creation and enterprise, and wealthy liberals, many of them either from the media industry themselves or from - they recognize the value of communications and are more ready to put money into a less profitable enterprise, namely the media.

Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush's watch as "deficits as far as the eye can see." But Mr. Obama's budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?

The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.

You all had something to do with keeping me employed.

I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.

But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about.

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.

The fallback position in politics is if you don't know what you want to be about, and if you don't know what your vision is, go at somebody else.

In Europe and the United States, you've got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect.

We've been probably to some degree too successful.

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans - unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

You need to look at Congress as having a certain capacity. Now, the capacity varies from year to year and from body to body, but there is a finite amount of things that Congress can attentively do.

Well, I'm a Christian. I was a born a Presbyterian and became an Episcopalian.

Somebody gets to be smart and somebody gets to be dumb. If we win, it'll be because of the president. And if we lose, it'll be because of me.

If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It's not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.

For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush.

Remember the Tea Party movement didn't get started in September of 2008 when the bank bailout was passed. It really began on Feb. 19th, 2009 when a television commentator named Rick Santelli stood up and said what the hell are we doing bailing out people who couldn't afford a mortgage by taking money from people like me who are prudent?

I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence.

Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real antiwar movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an antiwar rally.

If there's a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.

"Empathy" is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.

Alinsky's 1971 book, "Rules for Radicals," is a favorite of the Obamas. Michele Obama quoted it at the Democratic Convention. One Alinsky tactic is to "Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." That's what the White House did in targeting Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santelli and Jim Cramer.

I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it's meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.

Look, there ought to be politics in politics.

I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.

It's not comfortable for me to write about my family. I'm not comfortable writing about me.

Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals.

I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years.