First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"I'm the guy in the eighth grade who did not go across the floor and ask the girl to dance for two reasons. One is, she might say no and I'd be embarrassed; two, she might say yes and I'd have to dance…"
"I see myself as representing the conservative wing of the postindustrial society."
"I think that the mother killing the two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we need to change things. The only way you get change is to vote Republican."
"Now the reason I am being harshly critical is because I want you all to learn a lesson. When you see somebody doing something dumb, say it. You don't help your party any by neatly sitting off to one side and saying, "God I wish you weren't so stupid." You weaken your party. And when you say it, say it in the press, say it loud, fight, scrap, issue a press release, go make a speech."
"The number one fact about the news media is they love fights. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate."
"There were long periods in my marriage when I was in enormous pain, and I did a lot of things during that time that reflect how much pain I was in. I am not going to argue every point of that story, but I will say that it painted a picture of me that is essentially untrue."
"One of the great weaknesses of the Republican Party is we recruit middle-class people. Middle-class people, as a group, are told you should not shout at the table, you should be nice, you should have respect for other people, which usually means giving way to them. You want to go to the beach, they want to go to the movie, well, you ought to go to the movie, cause otherwise they'll get mad at you. So what do you do? We ended up going to Watergate because we didn't want to offend Richard Nixon. We ended up allowing Gerald Ford to do some things that were incredibly dumb, just unbelievably dumb. Gerald Ford personally cost me a congressional seat."
"I think that one of the great problems we have in the Republican Party is that we don't encourage you to be nasty. We encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful and all those Boy Scout words, which would be great around the camp fire, but are lousy in politics."
"The only explanation I can give myself for spending two hours here is that one or two or three of you will become leaders, as a result of a slightly better understanding of what the term means. The first thing it means is taking risks. Because all of you, if you try to do anything, are going to make mistakes. That shouldn't bother you, because Lyndon Johnson, when he was forty years older than you, made mistakes and destroyed his presidency. Richard Nixon, when he was forty-five years older than you, made mistakes and destroyed his presidency. Jimmy Carter makes mistakes on a daily basis. None of those things should worry you, that's the nature of this business. We're all human and we all goof."
"Everyone of you is old enough to have been a rifleman in Vietnam. A number of you are old enough to have been platoon leaders, or company commanders, depending on the situation, and how rapidly you move up in rank. This is the same business, we're just lucky, in this country, we don't use bullets, we use ballots instead. You're fighting a war. It is a war for power."
"Do you like the state of the Republican Party? Do you think you ought to respect Bill Brock because he has done such a great job? Or Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford, the only incumbent president since Herbert Hoover to lose an election? They have done a terrible job, a pathetic job. In my lifetime, literally in my lifetime, I was born in 1943, we have not had a competent national Republican leader. Not ever!"
"It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, with 15-year-olds killing each other, with 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and with 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can’t even read."
"On the one hand it's a lovely symbolism that the Dem slate in Georgia represents the old school civil rights coalition between black people and Jews. On the other, it's telling that the exact same tropes from then are being used by the gop in 2020"
"He was the original polariser…He was also, very importantly, one of the architects of one of the most pivotal elections in modern American history, the midterm elections of 1994, when Republicans took over the House and the Senate for the first time since the first two years of Dwight Eisenhower. That election also greatly contributed to polarisation because it wiped out a lot of moderate southern Democrats and replaced them with very conservative southern Republicans."
"Drilling without thinking has of course been Republican Party policy since May 2008. When gas prices soared to unprecedented heights, the conservative leader Newt Gingrich unveiled the slogan "Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less," with an emphasis on the now. The wildly popular campaign was a cry against caution, against study, against measured action. In Gingrich's telling, drilling at home wherever the oil and gas might be-locked in Rocky Mountain shale, in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and deep offshore-was a surefire way to lower the price at the pump, create jobs, and kick Arab ass all at once."
"It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States. That year, Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich did a TV spot with Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, in which they pledged to join forces and fight climate change together…Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over."
"He’s bright as hell, but I disagree with him."
"He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart person sounds like."
"Many who have heard my harsh assessments of Gingrich over the past year have assumed that I feel a personal animus toward my former colleague. That’s just not true. That fact is that I remain awestruck that Newt envisioned a Republican majority when his closest allies thought he was crazy. Even an eternal optimist like me laughed at the “Think Majority” sign hanging over the NRCC reception area in early 1994. But Newt was right and we were wrong. The Gingrich Revolution overtook Washington (with a huge assist from Bill Clinton’s overreaching agenda) and good things followed. Within a few years, Congress passed the first balanced budget in a generation, welfare reform, tax cuts and meaningful congressional changes. If Newt’s story ended there, I might have a Gingrich 2012 sign in my front yard. But unfortunately, it does not."
"When Newt showed up, he said we can become the majority, we can take back the House of Representatives. We hadn't had the House since the 1940s. And initially, none of us believed it. But he was persistent and he was tenacious. He kept it up, kept it up, kept it up. And finally by '94 he's the newly elected speaker of the House of Representatives with a Republican majority. So I wouldn't underestimate him."
"He’s a damn Republican, but I love him. He knows the government, he knows the issues…And I would feel better, even though we disagree philosophically — and I’m not being facetious — I’d feel better knowing that there’s somebody there with the depth and gravitas on the issues that Newt possesses."
"Let's face it…Gingrich saved our butt."
"He’s articulate and he tries to think of a conservative version of an idea that will solve a legitimate problem."
"Congratulations, Newt, on last night — that was an amazing interview…We don’t play games, Newt, right?"
"I think we ought to send Newt Gingrich to the moon."
"An immense amount got done but it’s also why the left hates Clinton. He signed welfare reform, he signed capital gains tax cut, he signed four balanced budgets. It’s nothing to do with his personal behavior. It’s very much like what happened to the prime minister in Great Britain, Tony Blair: both of them were centrist and both of them were viciously repudiated by their left even as they were popular in the country. It’s just fascinating stuff."
"If the Constitution gives me a way of forcing Newt Gingrich's feet to the fire, a way of forcing American politicians to live up to the letter of the law, then I'm going to do that."
"He’ll remain a dominant figure for a fairly long period of time, depending on how hard he wants to work at it and how serious it is. People fade pretty quickly if they don’t pay attention. This is a country of enormous restiveness."
"And I think we have to take this whole system apart and recognize that this is — this election is a great moment for the American people to decide do they want to have an honest election where they get to pick their leaders or do they just want corrupt machines such as the one that Stacey Abrams is building."
"So I think this is going to be an extraordinarily important election, and I think the odds are very high that if every Republican will vote — my model is very simple, we have to win by a bigger margin than Stacey Abrams can steal."
"You deliberately stood in the well of this House and took on these members when you knew they would not be here…It's un-American…It's the lowest thing that I've heard in my 32 years here."
"I am fascinated and intrigued with the natural world, whether in its paleontological form or its current form. I am intrigued with watching how animals operate and what they do, and how different systems coexist. I think it is endlessly fascinating. Plus, I like them. I have dogs, I like them. I have given zoos rhinoceroses and a variety of other things, and it is fun. I just went to the zoo in Nagoya, Japan, which is actually a quite nice zoo."
"If we want America to survive as a constitutional republic under the rule of law, which protects the right of free speech and is dedicated to the belief that each one of us is endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, we have no choice but to fight to defeat the anti-Americans and reassert our nation.Reagan would understand. Lincoln would understand. Freedom itself is at stake."
"I will stipulate you are a human being."
"The assault of the new conservatives—of Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Clarence Thomas and the rest of their pack—helped focus the march. African Americans read the message of the Gingrich-Dole agenda clearly. The deepest cuts in spending come not from programs benefiting the wealthy, the corporations, those who pay for their party. The cuts are targeted on the weak—poor mothers and children, the disabled, the elderly, the working poor. The cuts are targeted on the cities—on public housing, public health, public transportation, public water. To win support for this injustice, the poor and the urban are given a Black face, dismissed as hopeless genetically and culturally, and set up for the hit. The Gingrich-Dole strategy doesn't seem new or clever to African Americans; it seems but a tired sequel to the divisive politics of the old South. So the Million Man March called for a political recommitment. Gingrich and his crowd won the Congress by a cumulative total of 19,000 votes in 1994. Eight million eligible African Americans are not registred to vote. There was no conservative tidal wave; they won not because the wave was high, but because our walls were low."
"And you can quote me and use my voice saying it. The fact that someone was Vice-President does not make them immune to discovering whether they were involved in corruption. And it’s kind of astonishing to me that the American news media, in its passion for hating Trump, is wandering around saying, “Gee, it would be really terrible to ask the Ukrainians to find the truth.”"
"I’ve been active in this since 1958. That’s 62 years. I am the angriest I have been in that entire six decades. You have a group of corrupt people who have absolute contempt for the American people, who believe that we are so spineless, so cowardly, so unwilling to stand up for ourselves that they can steal the presidency. And we will wring our hands, bring in a few lawyers and do nothing…The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Nevada machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that."
"I suspect sometime tomorrow that Mike and I will both get phone calls, and one of us will be packing our bags to go to New York and the other one will be going to watch it on TV."
"Let me be as blunt and direct as I can be. Western civilization is in a war. We should frankly test every person here who is of a Muslim background, and if they believe in Sharia, they should be deported."
"I don’t know if I should say this, but it’s so much fun that I’m going to…Do you really want a two-pirate ticket?"
"I endorse Donald Trump. I am going to work very hard for the nominee."
"You are talking about a guy who was smart enough to build Trump Towers, build lots of hotels, build lots of casinos, and own the Miss Universe contest. He is not stupid. For many people, that seems to be inconceivable because they have a university Ph.D. theory of being smart."
"I'm going to go out on a limb tonight and you can keep this tape and remind me about it after the election, OK? Donald Trump’s going to win."
"We're not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs while it forecloses on Florida and is himself a stockholder in Freddie Mae and Freddie Mac while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together to understand what this is all about."
"Can we drop a little bit of the pious baloney? The fact is, you ran in '94 and lost. That's why you weren't serving in the Senate with Rick Santorum. The fact is, you had a very bad re-election rating, you dropped out of office, you had been out of state for something like 200 days preparing to run for president. You didn't have this interlude of citizenship while you thought about what you do. You were running for president while you were governor."
"By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American."
"Donald Trump’s going to win because in the end the country is not going to reward big banks and big unions and big bureaucracies and big donors and big corruption by voting for a big liar. And in the end, the country is going to say, you know, whatever Trump's weaknesses may be, he's a sincere guy trying very hard to get this country back on the right track."
"[T]ake a step back, and you look at the absurdity...Big money dominates the economic life of our country. They decide whether our jobs go to China or reinvested in America. They own the political system. Republican Party had a fundraiser here last month, $16 million in one night. Gingrich goes out around the country, $10,000-a-plate fundraising. That’s the issue."
"It's just like this pretense that he's a conservative. Here's a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in 'Romneycare,' puts Planned Parenthood in 'Romneycare,' raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he's magically a conservative."
"There is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment."