I do not believe that government should be in the business of telling women what they should do with their bodies.

I have been very happy in the House of Representatives.

I once told Nixon that the Presidency is like being a jackass caught in a hail storm. You’ve got to just stand there and take it.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

I was the first woman to burn my bra – it took the fire department four days to put it out.

The government argues that First Amendment rights are outweighed by the need to prosecute those who transmit classified information and documents.

You can’t just have slogans, you can’t just have catchy phrases. You have to have an agenda. And I think what the Republican Party has to do, if it’s going to incorporate the tea party efforts in it, is to come up with an agenda that the American people can see, touch, and actually believe in, and something they believe in.

I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.

There’s no political point worth my son’s life.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

If you have ten thousand regulations you destroy all respect for the law.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Any man who wants to be president is either an egomaniac or crazy.

I don’t make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts.

I think Canadians are more interested in international events than Americans because it is such a small country, so politics affect it more.

Politics is not a game. It is an earnest business.

Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for.

Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out… without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language… one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Remember, no one decides who they’re going to vote for based on the vice president. I mean that literally.

If people continue to feel like Democrats are looking after poor folks and Republicans are looking after rich folks and nobody is looking after me, then we don’t get a lot of stuff done. And the trend lines evidence the fact that folks have gotten squeezed. And obviously, 2007, 2008 really ripped open for people how vulnerable they were.

That government is best which governs least.

I think, in politics, half the people are gonna like you, and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

I will never retire from politics, the revolution, or the ideas I have.

The New Deal repudiation of democracy has left the Republican Party alone the guardian of the Ark of the Covenant with its charter of freedom.

The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television.

The President is always abused. If he isn’t, he isn’t doing anything.

There was a stool there, and some fella kept asking me if I wanted to sit down. When I saw the stool sitting there, it gave me the idea. I’ll just put the stool out there and I’ll talk to Mr. Obama and ask him why he didn’t keep all of the promises he made to everybody.

Ronald Reagan used to alarm other constituencies by speaking freely about the End Times foreshadowed in the Bible.

The truth of the matter is that Iran is a cancer.

I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.

No part of the education of a politician is more indispensable than the fighting of elections.

President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.

Certainly in the next 50 years we shall see a woman president, perhaps sooner than you think. A woman can and should be able to do any political job that a man can do.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

I found this national debt, doubled, wrapped in a big bow waiting for me as I stepped into the Oval Office.

There’s some jerks. There’s some big egos. There are a few that think they’re one of the Founding Fathers… in both parties.

Latinos are Republican. They just don’t know it yet.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that either the Democratic or Republican party has produced at least since I’ve been around. He’s fresh, he’s new, he’s insightful.

There will be no whitewash in the White House.

Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well.

Israel is a pretty crazy state.

Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy, and they have to be – protect themselves. That’s why you have state secret laws. Citizens are not supposed to know what their government is doing to them.

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don’t like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don’t expect freedom to survive very long.

A specter is haunting Europe – the specter of communism.

The United States tyrannizes and pillages the globalized world with its political, economic, technological, and military might.

A Christian who does not pray for those who govern is not a good Christian.

Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.

Life in general has never been even close to fair, so the pretense that the government can make it fair is a valuable and inexhaustible asset to politicians who want to expand government.

And frankly, I don’t understand – I mean, I’m obviously a card-carrying Democrat – but I can’t understand why any woman would want to vote for Mitt Romney, except maybe Mrs. Romney.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Antitrust is the way that the government promotes markets when there are market failures. It has nothing to do with the idea of free information.

If… many influential people have failed to understand, or have just forgotten, what we were up against in the Cold War and how we overcame it, they are not going to be capable of securing, let alone enlarging, the gains that liberty has made.

You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.