Jack Kemp Quotes

Winning is like shaving - you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum.

Conservatives define compassion not by the number of people who recieve some kind of government aid but rather by the number of people who no longer need it.

The power of one man or one woman doing the right thing for the right reason, and at the right time, is the greatest influence in our society.

There's no limit to what free men and free women in a free market with free enterprise can accomplish when people are free to follow their dream.

When people lack jobs, opportunity, and ownership of property they have little or no stake in their communities.

There are no limits to our future if we don't put limits on our people.

He'll call that trickle-down. I call it Niagara Falls.

The only way to oppose a bad idea is to replace it with a good idea.

If we are to change America, we must change the United States Congress.

Economic growth doesn't mean anything if it leaves people out.

I believe in civil liberties for homosexuals. I guess I'd have to say I'd draw the line at letting them teach in the schools.

The chance to own a home; chance to own an education; chance to get access to capital. This is the real civil rights battle of the twenty-first century.

In America, we tax work, investment, employment, savings, and production, while we subsidize non-work, consumption, and debt. It's time we reverse this trend.

My passion for ideas is not matched with a passion for partisan or electoral politics.

I have come to think that capital punishment should be abolished.

All too often the Democratic Party has taken the black vote for granted, and all too often the Republican Party has written it off.

Every team requires unity. A team has to move as one unit, one force, with each person understanding and assisting the roles of his teammates. If the team doesn't do this, whatever the reason, it goes down in defeat. You win or lose as a team, as a family.

Our goals for this nation must be nothing less than to double the size of our economy and bring prosperity and jobs, ownership and equality of opportunity to all Americans, especially those living in our nation's pockets of poverty.

Quarterbacks are always ready.

Republicans many times can't get the words 'equality of opportunity' out of their mouths. Their lips do not form that way.

The real problem is deflation. That is the opposite of inflation but equally serious to the borrower.

We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented - free enterprise

When democratic governments create economic calamity, free markets get the blame.

There ought to be a thoughtful welfare-reform debate that doesn't turn into something that could be called scapegoating.

The leaders of the Democratic Party aren't soft on Communism. They're soft on Democracy.

I think Bush understands the Internet and the incredible expansion of global e-commerce.

Taxes on capital, taxes on labor, inflation, bureaucratic regulation, minimum wage laws, are all - to different degrees - unnecessary slices of the wedge that stand between an individual's effort and reward for that effort.

There really has not been a strong Republican message to either the poor or the African American community at large.

With the end of the cold war, all the 'isms' of the 20th century - Fascism, Nazism, Communism and the evil of apartheid-ism - have failed. Except one. Only democracy has shown itself true the help of all mankind.

... giving tax incentives for more labor ownership of company stock will do more to create jobs and increase productivity than all the "emergency full employment" bills proposed.

There is a kind of victory in good work, no matter how humble.

Pro football gave me a good sense of perspective to enter politics: I'd already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded and hung in effigy.

The Democratic Party is the party of the status quo.

Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.

I think I've advanced my views with compassion and tolerance.

Lately the First Amendment has been interpreted to deny equal protection of the law to those who believe in God. The Constitution established freedom for religion, not freedom from religion!

Democracy without morality is impossible.

I unabashedly, unashamedly, unequivocally support the explosion of entrepreneurs in the capitalist system.

The zeitgeist is for cutting spending and balancing the budget. But I do not want the Republican Party to be perceived as putting the budget ahead of people, jobs and education.

My wife had a miscarriage. We have rarely talked about it. It did make me more aware of the sanctity of human life, how precious every child is.

We are all the sons or daughters of immigrants - some more recent than others - but all dedicated to the triumph of an idea that serves as the touchstone of what it means to be an American. This America is the only America that we have hitherto known - if being conservative has anything to do with conserving the principles of our past, then no conservative has any business bashing legal immigration.

I don't use labels a lot.

The Soviet Union represents a threat in terms of might. It is a joke in terms of its economy and what it has to offer the Third World - a laughingstock to countries that are looking for an economic-development model.

Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It's based on merit.

Of course, every job I ever had I thought I was born for.

Some people have theorized that I lurched to prove myself intellectually. But it was not any lurch. It was more a kind of awakening.

People want opportunity so they can earn security.

You don't boo at a Kemp rally. You boo at football games.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

There's always cause for concern if bad policies are pursued.