Top 40 John Ashcroft Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Doing what is right in the face of adversity is not always easy or popular. Critics may assail you, but the critics don’t always realize what they don’t know or don’t understand, because they don’t have access to all the information.”

— John Ashcroft

2. “There is no priority higher than the prevention of terrorism.”

— John Ashcroft

3. “If necessity is the mother of invention, it’s the father of cooperation. And we’re cooperating like never before.”

— John Ashcroft

4. “A trustee has a responsibility to guard the assets of others with a higher degree of care than he does his own.”

— John Ashcroft

5. “Only God, no other kings!”

— John Ashcroft

6. “To those who scare peace loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: your tactics aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.”

— John Ashcroft

7. “There’s nothing more rewarding or important than to be involved in God’s work of redemption.”

— John Ashcroft

8. “Our priorities should be: recognizing the voice of God and responding to the voice of God.”

— John Ashcroft

9. “People who commit crimes should be responsible for those crimes. It doesn’t matter whether they’re priests or ministers or atheists.”

— John Ashcroft

10. “Christianity is a faith in which God sent his Son to die for you.”

— John Ashcroft

11. “We are a nation called to defend freedom – a tradition that is not a grant of any government or document, but is an endowment from God.”

— John Ashcroft

12. “The worst mistake a boss can make is not to say ‘well done’.”

— John Ashcroft

13. “Civilized people – Muslims, Christians and Jews – all understand that the source of freedom and human dignity is the Creator.”

— John Ashcroft

14. “The goal of terror is not traditional territorial enlargement; rather the war target of the terrorist is the dismemberment of the will of the community it terrorizes.”

— John Ashcroft

15. “What we learned on September 11 is that the unthinkable is now thinkable in the world.”

— John Ashcroft

16. “The Internet provides very serious challenges to our ability to keep from children the kinds of things that are destructive to them.”

— John Ashcroft

17. “Just as the First and Fourth Amendment secure individual rights of speech and security respectively, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers.”

— John Ashcroft

18. “Simply put, international terrorism made international cooperation mandatory rather than elective. Collective security has become the only real security against the hydra-headed monster of international terror.”

— John Ashcroft

19. “To me, failure is not fatal unless you quit; getting knocked down is not embarrassing unless you allow it to keep you down.”

— John Ashcroft

20. “The liberties and freedoms which we hold dear and we recognize and cherish and respect guide the way we gather information in the United States.”

— John Ashcroft

21. “By tearing down the wall between law enforcement and the intelligence community, we have been able to share information in a way that was virtually impossible before the Patriot Act.”

— John Ashcroft

22. “Do not allow your sorrow or your rage to become hostility toward people on the basis of their ethnicity or their religious views. That is unacceptable; it is out of bounds, and if you break the law, we will prosecute you for it.”

— John Ashcroft

23. “How sad, that the group with the most access to the truth chose in several strategic instances to look the other way.”

— John Ashcroft

24. “I think all we should legislate is morality.”

— John Ashcroft

25. “Nothing remains great without a capacity to change and to accommodate the conditions of a changing world.”

— John Ashcroft

26. “If America is to be great in the future, it will be if we understand that our source is not civic and temporal, but our source is godly and eternal.”

— John Ashcroft

27. “The new rule says that the FBI has the right to go to public places on the same terms and conditions as other members of the public for counter-terrorism purposes.”

— John Ashcroft

28. “Sometimes the act of walking in the face of the elements helps us come to grips with reality. Or it simply exhausts us to the point of seeing the futility of resisting reality and the futility of denial.”

— John Ashcroft

29. “It doesn’t help to wait until something happens and then prosecute the offenders, especially if it’s the idea of the offender to extinguish himself in the commission of the crime.”

— John Ashcroft

30. “We’ve got to understand that the whole nature of the way American democracy guards its freedom has been changed.”

— John Ashcroft

31. “For the first time in a long time, our leaders in Washington understand what Americans of all religious backgrounds have long held to be true: through faith, all things are possible.”

— John Ashcroft

32. “We must embrace the power of faith, but we must never confuse politics and piety. For me, may I say that it is against my religion to impose my religion.”

— John Ashcroft

33. “Prior to September 11, we thought the world beyond our shores was one world of risk and the world in our continent was another world of risk.”

— John Ashcroft

34. “The way the terrorist is trained to operate, especially the suicide terrorists, makes punishment and the threat of punishment far less valuable to those who would prevent the crime.”

— John Ashcroft

35. “The charges of the hysterics are revealed for what they are: castles in the air built on misrepresentation, supported by unfounded fear, held aloft by hysteria.”

— John Ashcroft

36. “All of us want to have meaning in our lives and want to feel like we’re doing something that makes a difference. I believe we’re doing that in the Justice Department.”

— John Ashcroft

37. “We have to think outside the box, inside the Constitution, find ways to do things that will elevate our security, reduce the risk of the incidence of terrorist attack.”

— John Ashcroft

38. “Agents need to be free to pursue investigations in ways that they haven’t. There have been restraints that a reformed FBI needs to make sure we don’t impose.”

— John Ashcroft

39. “Reasonable regulations regarding the ownership of weapons are appropriate.”

— John Ashcroft

40. “Every medium by which people communicate can be subject to exploitation by those with illegal intentions. Nevertheless, this is no reason to hand Big Brother the keys to unlock our e-mail diaries, open our ATM records, read our medical records, or translate our international communications.”

— John Ashcroft

41. “We need to strengthen our analytic capacity in Washington, we need to centralize the anti-terrorism effort.”

— John Ashcroft

42. “This view of the text comports with the all but unanimous understanding of the Founding Fathers...”

— John Ashcroft

43. “The FBI has long been a part of the security for the nation’s banks because bank robberies have been a priority.”

— John Ashcroft

44. “The Patriot Act allows and provides a basis for an exchange of information.”

— John Ashcroft

45. “Nothing that we have authorized conflicts with any law regarding privacy or any provision of the constitution.”

— John Ashcroft

46. “The FBI. is a massive culture. It’s been a culture that served America well, and it’s been focused on prosecution. But what we need in terms of terrorism is prevention.”

— John Ashcroft

47. “I don’t play full court anymore. I just play half-court.”

— John Ashcroft

48. “I decided this early on at Justice: if the traditional way was the most effective way of doing something, then we’d maintain it. But if it was not functioning at optimum levels, we would be doing the country a disservice by continuing to do things “like we’ve always done them.””

— John Ashcroft

49. “Unique among the nations, America recognized the source of our character as being godly and eternal, not being civic and temporal. And because we have understood that our source is eternal, America has been different. We have no king but Jesus.”

— John Ashcroft