Top 50 Karl Rove Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is rough for a lot of people. Some people live in greater material circumstances than others, but life is rough for everybody.”

— Karl Rove

2. “And not only that, I also have the MacBook Air which is really cool. Even my wife is jealous of my MacBook Air.”

— Karl Rove

3. “Now is the time to be bold. It is easy when the wind is at your back. But the real test is now when the wind is in our face. That’s when we find out if we are tough enough. Inspired enough, committed enough.”

— Karl Rove

4. “All politicians operate within an Orwellian nimbus where words don’t mean what they normally mean, but Rovism posits that there is no objective, verifiable reality at all. Reality is what you say it is,...”

— Karl Rove

5. “We face a brutal enemy who will kill the innocent for one purpose and that is to gain control of the Middle East and to use the leverage of oil to bring down the West, and to attack us again.”

— Karl Rove

6. “Well, marriage is a very important part of our culture and our society. If we want to have a hopeful and decent society, we ought to aim for the ideal.”

— Karl Rove

7. “I hate to sound sort of diffident about it but it strikes me that a lot of people on the right have got active lives and are doing other things.”

— Karl Rove

8. “You may end up with a different math, but you’re entitled to your math. I’m entitled to the math.”

— Karl Rove

9. “I have become an adjective. There is something called a Rovian-style of campaigning and it’s meant as an insult. One columnist said it consists mainly of throwing mud until it sticks. One prominent blogger described the elements of a textbook Rovian race as fear-based, smear-based and anything goes.”

— Karl Rove

10. “Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.”

— Karl Rove

11. “If you look underneath the surface of the Tea Party movement, on the other hand, you will find that it is not sophisticated. It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.”

— Karl Rove

12. “I would have strong opinions and be prepared to argue my case, but if you talk to my colleagues, I think you’d find they consider me the jokester, the informal mayor of the West Wing.”

— Karl Rove

13. “As people do better, they start voting like Republicans – unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.”

— Karl Rove

14. “Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.”

— Karl Rove

15. “I’m not a journalist. I’m a pundit. I’m a commentator, I’m somebody with an opinion.”

— Karl Rove

16. “In his first 100 days, Mr. Obama has put the fate of his presidency in the hands of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He may come to regret that decision.”

— Karl Rove

17. “I don’t know about you, but moderation and restraint is not what I felt when I watched the twin towers crumble to the ground, a side of the Pentagon destroyed, and almost 3,000 of our fellow citizens perish in flames and rubble.”

— Karl Rove

18. “We need to be asking for the vote in the most powerful way possible, which is to have people asking for the vote who are comfortable and look like and sound like the people that we’re asking for the vote from.”

— Karl Rove

19. “Negative politics have always been around.”

— Karl Rove

20. “Guy got in a gyrocopter in Gettysburg, flew under the radar all the way to Washington and came – What if he had had rather than petitions to Congress had had a bomb?”

— Karl Rove

21. “When you appoint someone, you appoint somebody because of their character, their convictions, their abilities. And not because you have a belief, a confidence, in a foreordained outcome in any given decision.”

— Karl Rove

22. “I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.”

— Karl Rove

23. “Somebody gets to be smart and somebody gets to be dumb. If we win, it’ll be because of the president. And if we lose, it’ll be because of me.”

— Karl Rove

24. “At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views of the world.”

— Karl Rove

25. “Well, I’m a Christian. I was a born a Presbyterian and became an Episcopalian.”

— Karl Rove

26. “Hurricane Sandy interrupted Mr. Romney’s momentum and allowed Mr. Obama to look presidential and bipartisan.”

— Karl Rove

27. “I believe in traditional marriage.”

— Karl Rove

28. “Once again the powers of light and good have triumphed over the media!”

— Karl Rove

29. “Ronald Reagan wasn’t in the establishment of the Republican Party either, nor was Richard Nixon.”

— Karl Rove

30. “The world is a better place with Saddam Hussein gone.”

— Karl Rove

31. “Karl Rove told me about Valerie Plame’s identity on July 11, 2003. I called him because Ambassador Wilson was in the news that week. I didn’t know Ambassador Wilson even had a wife until I talked to Karl Rove, and he said that she worked at the Agency and worked on WMD.”

— Karl Rove

32. “I’ve been booed on stages. I’m a little bit tougher than to walk off a stage because someone says something ugly.”

— Karl Rove

33. “The claim made by Team Obama that every dollar in stimulus translates into a dollar-and-a-half in growth is economic fiction. The costs of stimulus reduce future growth. No country has ever spent itself to prosperity. The price of stimulus has to be paid sometime.”

— Karl Rove

34. “If you really want to diminish a candidate, depict him as the foil of his handler. This is as old in American politics as politics itself.”

— Karl Rove

35. “What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn’t really ‘empathy’ and ‘understanding.’ He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice.”

— Karl Rove

36. “I mean, if you have to wake up in the morning to be validated by the editorial page of the New York Times, you got a pretty sorry existence.”

— Karl Rove

37. “The difficulty for Mr. Obama will be when the public sees where his decisions lead – higher inflation, higher interest rates, higher taxes, sluggish growth, and a jobless recovery.”

— Karl Rove

38. “Mr. Obama plans to boost federal spending 25 percent while nearly tripling the national debt over 10 years. Americans know that this kind of spending will have economic consequences, including new taxes being imposed by the new progressives.”

— Karl Rove

39. “I know enough about European politics to know you’ve got a lot of crazy people who make their way onto the ballot.”

— Karl Rove

40. “Our competition for American business is no longer in the next county or the next state, it’s around the world.”

— Karl Rove

41. “Cindy Sheehan is a clown. There is no real antiwar movement. No serious politician, with anything to do with anything, would show his face at an antiwar rally.”

— Karl Rove

42. “If there’s a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is.”

— Karl Rove

43. “Mr. Obama denounced the $2.3 trillion added to the national debt on Mr. Bush’s watch as ‘deficits as far as the eye can see.’ But Mr. Obama’s budget adds $9.3 trillion to the debt over the next 10 years. What happened to Obama the deficit hawk?”

— Karl Rove

44. “It’s not comfortable for me to write about my family. I’m not comfortable writing about me.”

— Karl Rove

45. “I think it’s dawning on some Democrats that obstructing the Patriot Act, like they’ve been obstructing everything else, is bad for them politically.”

— Karl Rove

46. “I think if you talk to my colleagues, I was less than a fearsome individual.”

— Karl Rove

47. “If we do with Latinos what we did with African-Americans, Republicans and conservatives will be doomed.”

— Karl Rove

48. “For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush.”

— Karl Rove

49. “If you make a mistake, clean it up quicker rather than later.”

— Karl Rove

50. “And I think there’s something about conservatives frankly – and the Left, when it comes to their channels of persuasion, are unpersuasive. They are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.”

— Karl Rove