“I could have ended the war in a month. I could have made North Vietnam look like a mud puddle.”

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.

Conservatism therefore looks upon the enhancement of man’s spiritual nature as the primary concern of political philosophy. Liberals, on the other hand,— in the name of a concern for “human beings”— regard the satisfaction of economic wants as the dominant mission of society.

The best thing Clinton could do — I think I wrote him a letter about this, but I’m not sure — is to shut up. Every time I turn that radio on, there’s Clinton, making a speech. And he makes speeches on a subject he doesn’t know anything about. He has no discipline.

To insist on strength … is not war-mongering. It is peace-mongering.

You’ve got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you’re going to hit civilians.

I am a conservative Republican, but I believe in democracy and the separation of church and state. The conservative movement is founded on the simple tenet that people have the right to live life as they please as long as they don’t hurt anyone else in the process.

I won’t say that the papers misquote me, but I sometimes wonder where Christianity would be today if some of those reporters had been Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

The effect of Welfarism on freedom will be felt later on – after its beneficiaries have become its victims, after dependence on government has turned into bondage and it is too late to unlock the jail.

A man from the west will fight over three things: water, women and gold, and usually in that order.

Without the National Federation of Republican Women, there would be no Republican Party.

It is safe to say that the U.S. Congress is now run by paid staffers, not by people elected to do the job.

It’s a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president . . . except me.

The fellow has absolutely no principles.”Money and gall” is all he has.

I am frankly sick and tired of the political preachers telling me as a citizen that if I want to be a moral person, I must believe in A, B, C, and D. Just who do they think they are? And from where do they presume to claim the right to dictate their moral beliefs to me?

Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud, is it decreed that one half of the flock should be the persecutor of the other? Is it for you, mankind, to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?

We Californians are constantly accused of not having seasons, but we do. We have fire, flood, mud, and drought.

Mud can make you prisoner and the plains can make you dry.

A girl is Innocence playing in the mud, Beauty standing on its head, and Motherhood dragging a doll by the foot.

Strategy should evolve out of the mud of the marketplace, not in the antiseptic environment of an ivory tower.

Vulgarity of manners defiles fine garments more than mud.

When an unbaked pot is broken, the potter can use the mud to make a new one; but when a baked one is broken, he cannot do the same any longer

The fish lives in the mud, but its skin is always bright and shiny.