“When I’m not a politician, I’ll be dead.”

I’d rather see a woman elected…They understand they can’t spend more money than the old man brings home.

We are on the Colorado — that means something more to me than electric power or a harnessed river.

Whether in families or in politics, a good observation: “One can disagree without being disagreeable.”

To disagree, one doesn’t have to be disagreeable.

You don’t need to be straight to fight and die for your country. You just need to shoot straight.

I have the unmitigated gall to think that I could lead men anywhere, business, politics or combat.

Well, once you’ve been in the Canyon and once you’ve sort of fallen in love with it, it never ends…it’s always been a fascinating place to me, in fact I’ve often said that if I ever had a mistress it would be the Grand Canyon.

I think any man in business would be foolish to fool around with his secretary. If it’s somebody else’s secretary, fine.

Women are hard enough to handle now without giving them a gun!

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Any pilot can describe the mechanics of flying. What it can do for the spirit of man is beyond description.

And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents’ “interests,” I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.

It’s political Daddyism and it’s as old as demagogues and despotism.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

The only summit meeting that can succeed is one that does not take place.

Hubert Humphrey talks so fast that listening to him is like trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.

It only takes a politician believing in what he says for the others to stop believing him.

Getting high is a lot more real than listening to a politician. You can think that getting high actually did happen – that you danced, and got sweaty, and carried on. It really did happen.

You listen to a politician making a speech, and it is like hearing nothing. Whereas, music is unmistakably music.

I get no respect. The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

The way my luck is running, if I was a politician I would be honest.

There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money.

Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don’t draft people; it’s not jury duty.

I rarely meet a politician that I don’t like personally. They are generally well endowed with charm. Therein lies the danger.