Top 70 Jack Kemp Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

2. “There’s only one race – it’s human. We are all brothers and sisters.”

— Jack Kemp

3. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

4. “Economic growth doesn’t mean anything if it leaves people out.”

— Jack Kemp

5. “Winning is like shaving – you do it every day or you wind up looking like a bum.”

— Jack Kemp

6. “The only thing I can do is tell the truth as I see it and let the chips fall where they may.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

8. “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it and kick it and run with it and put it in your hands, a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist sport.”

— Jack Kemp

9. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

10. “There are no limits to our future if we don’t put limits on our people.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

13. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

14. “We must win the war on poverty by enlisting the greatest weapon ever invented – free enterprise.”

— Jack Kemp

15. “Democracy is not a mathematical deduction proved once and for all time. Democracy is a just faith fervently held, commitment to be tested again and again in the fiery furnace of history.”

— Jack Kemp

16. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

17. “In a recent fire Bob Dole’s library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn’t even finished coloring one of them.”

— Jack Kemp

18. “I can’t hide my feelings.”

— Jack Kemp

19. “I can’t help but care about the rights of the people I used to shower with.”

— Jack Kemp

20. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

21. “Democracy without morality is impossible.”

— Jack Kemp

22. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

23. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

24. “I am not antigovernment. I would not run a campaign against government.”

— Jack Kemp

25. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

26. “He’ll call that trickle-down. I call it Niagara Falls.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

28. “Councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.”

— Jack Kemp

29. “The only law we broke was the Brezhnev doctrine that once a country is in the Soviet bloc it cannot be overthrown.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

31. “I would be a fool to put my feet down in a position where I can’t accommodate metamorphoses.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

33. “We want peace with all our hearts. But peace cannot be achieved through weakness.”

— Jack Kemp

34. “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!”

— Jack Kemp

35. “Football is a metaphor for the kind of country we want to create. It’s based on merit.”

— Jack Kemp

36. “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.”

— Jack Kemp

37. “There’s always cause for concern if bad policies are pursued.”

— Jack Kemp

38. “Affirmative action based on quotas is wrong – wrong because it is antithetical to the genius of the American idea: individual liberty.”

— Jack Kemp

39. “We don’t need to bring down the rich folk to help the poor.”

— Jack Kemp

40. “I think I’ve advanced my views with compassion and tolerance.”

— Jack Kemp

41. “Ladies and gentlemen, communism didn’t fall. It was pushed.”

— Jack Kemp

42. “We are going to make sure that America is open to legal immigration because that is wealth and the talent and the entrepreneurial skills for the 21st Century.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

44. “Quarterbacks are always ready.”

— Jack Kemp

45. “I can’t understand why the Democratic parties seem so hostile to economic growth and business.”

— Jack Kemp

46. “I never met a poor person who wanted to soak the rich; they want to get rich.”

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

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

— Jack Kemp

49. “Its no secret that I’ve never liked tax credits.”

— Jack Kemp

50. “The leaders of the Democratic Party aren’t soft on Communism. They’re soft on Democracy.”

— Jack Kemp