Top 80 Barry M. Goldwater Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “If everybody in this town connected with politics had to leave town because of chasing women and drinking, you would have no government.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

52. “Any government which can promise you everything you want can also take away everything you have.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

54. “Here we have, by prominent spokesmen of both political parties, an unqualified repudiation of the principle of limited government. There is no reference by either of them to the Constitution, or any attempt to define the legitimate functions of government. The government can do whatever needs to be done; note, too, the implicit but necessary assumption that it is the government itself that determines what needs to be done.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

55. “The Conservative believes that man is, in part, an economic, an animal creature; but that he is also a spiritual creature with spiritual needs and spiritual desires. What is more, these needs and desires reflect the superior side of man’s nature, and thus take precedence over his economic wants.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

56. “Trade unions infringe upon the property rights of company owners.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

58. “I thought of something my old coach at Staunton had often said: ‘We win some, we lose some, and some get rained out; but we always suit up.’”

— Barry M. Goldwater

59. “Graft and corruption are symptoms of the illness that besets the labor movement, not the cause of it. The cause is the enormous economic and political power now concentrated in the hands of union leaders.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

60. “To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

61. “Unlimited campaign spending eats at the heart of the democratic process.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

63. “Some programs have been theatrical masterpieces, but all we’re seeing is the negative side of nuclear war.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

64. “Freedom of association is one of the natural rights of man. Clearly, therefore, it should also be a “civil” right. Right-to-work laws derive from the natural law: they are simply an attempt to give freedom of association the added protection of civil law. I.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

66. “If the Conservative is less anxious than his Liberal brethren to increase Social Security ‘benefits,’ it is because he is more anxious than his Liberal brethren that people be free throughout their lives to spend their earnings when and as they see fit.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

67. “I’ve played everything – baseball, football, basketball. I can still swim a mile a day. That’s why I can’t walk.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

68. “Can any of us refute the wisdom of Madison and the other framers? Can anyone look at the carnage in Iran, the bloodshed in Northern Ireland or the bombs bursting in Lebanon and yet question the dangers of injecting religious issues into the affairs of state?”

— Barry M. Goldwater

69. “I say that when you elect a president you want a man to manage the legitimate business of your government. The government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take it away.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

70. “I think the President ought to bring everybody that’s in American uniform back because we’re headed for war.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

71. “The best thing Clinton could do – I think I wrote him a letter about this, but I’m not sure – is to shut up. He has no discipline.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

72. “Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man’s liberty. Government represents power in the hands of some men to control and regulate the lives of other men. And power, as Lord Acton said, corrupts men. “Absolute power,” he added, “corrupts absolutely.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

73. “And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse – the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

75. “The only summit meeting that can succeed is the one that does not take place.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

77. “Most Americans have no real understanding of the operation of the international money lenders. The accounts of the Federal Reserve System have never been audited. It operates outside the control of Congress and manipulates the credit of the United States.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

78. “I understand Jacqueline Kennedy has redone the White House in eighteenth-century style. Why, then, I’d fit in perfectly.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

79. “Let us henceforth make war on all monopolies – whether corporate or union. The enemy of freedom is unrestrained power, and the champions of freedom will fight against the concentration of power wherever they find it.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

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

— Barry M. Goldwater

81. “The same reasons apply to unions. Industry-wide price-fixing causes economic dislocations? So does industry-wide wage-fixing. A wage that is appropriate in one part of the country may not be in another area where economic conditions are very different. Corporate monopolies impair the operation of the free market, and thus injure the consuming public. So do union monopolies.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

82. “But I am here concerned not so much by the abandonment of States’ Rights by the national Democratic Party – an event that occurred some years ago when that party was captured by the Socialist ideologues in and about the labor movement – as by the unmistakable tendency of the Republican Party to adopt the same course.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

83. “Nixon was the most dishonest individual I have ever met in my life. He lied to his wife, his family, his friends, his colleagues in the Congress, lifetime members of his own political party, the American people and the world.”

— Barry M. Goldwater

84. “Thus, for the American Conservative, there is no difficulty in identifying the day’s overriding political challenge: it is to preserve and extend freedom.”

— Barry M. Goldwater