Top 40 Mitch McConnell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You’ll regret this, and you may regret this a lot sooner than you think.”

— Mitch McConnell

2. “The money that goes into Social Security is not the government’s money. it’s your money. You paid for it.”

— Mitch McConnell

3. “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

— Mitch McConnell

4. “We have a debt the size of our economy, which makes us look a lot like Greece.”

— Mitch McConnell

5. “Whether it’s before the election or after the election, the principle is the American people are choosing their next president and their next president should pick this Supreme Court nominee.”

— Mitch McConnell

6. “It just doesn’t occur to an American that someone else will solve their problems. Americans take pride in solving problems for themselves. And if we fail, we get back up and try again. It’s what we do. It’s who we are.”

— Mitch McConnell

7. “I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting. Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this – it’s a hostage that’s worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”

— Mitch McConnell

8. “The minimum wage is mostly an entry-level wage for young people.”

— Mitch McConnell

9. “Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition...”

— Mitch McConnell

10. “The president feels not only do we need to change these rogue regimes, but even our friendly allies, who really basically have, sort of, benign dictatorships, need to get with the program if they want to have long-term security and prosperity from terrorism.”

— Mitch McConnell

11. “The worst day of my political life was when President George W. Bush signed McCain-Feingold into law in the early part of his first Administration.”

— Mitch McConnell

12. “Public disclosure of campaign contributions and spending should be expedited so voters can judge for themselves what is appropriate.”

— Mitch McConnell

13. “It is time for a leader who will lead.”

— Mitch McConnell

14. “We ought to make sure that the eligibility for entitlements meets the demographics of America.”

— Mitch McConnell

15. “All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we’ve had in modern times.”

— Mitch McConnell

16. “As the leader of the Republicans what I’m telling that we elected the president to be president. It’s time for him to step up to the plate and lead us in the direction of reducing our excessive spending.”

— Mitch McConnell

17. “The debt they ran up in the first year of the Obama administration is bigger than the last four years of the Bush combined.”

— Mitch McConnell

18. “By their own admission, leaders of the Republican Revolution of 1994 think their greatest mistake was overlooking the power of the veto. They gave the impression they were somehow in charge when they weren’t.”

— Mitch McConnell

19. “I’m really proud of this Supreme Court and the way they’ve been dealing with the issue of First Amendment political speech.”

— Mitch McConnell

20. “America is about to turn the page on Barack Obama’s four-year experiment in big government.”

— Mitch McConnell

21. “I’ve often wished we had more women in the Senate.”

— Mitch McConnell

22. “The White House has a choice: They can change course, or they can double down on a vision of government that the American people have roundly rejected.”

— Mitch McConnell

23. “After adding trillions to the debt on big-government policies most Americans didn’t ask for and which we couldn’t afford, Democratic leaders say they need more money, which they intend to take from small business, even though small businesses create the majority of new jobs.”

— Mitch McConnell

24. “Are we still a country that takes risks, that innovates, that believes anything is possible? Or are we a country that is resigned to whatever liberty the government decides to dish out?”

— Mitch McConnell

25. “Tiger Woods and John Edwards had a better year than the Stimulus bill.”

— Mitch McConnell

26. “It’s a shame that the president doesn’t embrace the effort to reduce spending. None of us like using situations like the sequester or the debt ceiling or the operation of government to try to engage the president to deal with this.”

— Mitch McConnell

27. “For everybody who thinks it’s warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn’t.”

— Mitch McConnell

28. “We’re living under the Obama economy. Any CEO in America with a record like this after three years on the job would be graciously shown the door. This president blames the managers instead. He blames the folks on the shop floor. He blames the weather.”

— Mitch McConnell

29. “The bill that job creators and out-of-work Americans need us to pass is the one that ensures taxes won’t go up – one that says Americans and small-business owners won’t get hit with more bad news at the end of the year.”

— Mitch McConnell

30. “The new troops in Iraq need to be Iraqi troops.”

— Mitch McConnell

31. “Syria and Iran have always had a pretty tight relationship, and it looks to me like they just cooked up a press release to put out to sort of restate the obvious. They’re both problem countries; we know that. And this doesn’t change anything.”

— Mitch McConnell

32. “Americans don’t think we should be raising taxes on anybody, especially in the middle of a recession.”

— Mitch McConnell

33. “A reporter asked recently, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ I replied that I generally sleep well, but if I ever do have trouble, I don’t have to count sheep. I count all the states I’m glad I’m not the governor of.”

— Mitch McConnell

34. “Republicans will not be reduced to being the tax collectors for the Obama economy.”

— Mitch McConnell

35. “More women are graduating from college now than men.”

— Mitch McConnell

36. “We all know that Social Security is one of this country’s greatest success stories in the 20th century.”

— Mitch McConnell

37. “On the issue of Iraq, it is my hope, and my challenge to my colleagues, that our debate will be based on what is best for the future of our nation and for Iraq, not what’s best for a political party or presidential campaign.”

— Mitch McConnell

38. “It’s a shame that we have to use whatever leverage we have in Congress to get the president to deal with the biggest problem confronting our future. And that’s our excessive spending.”

— Mitch McConnell

39. “It seems with every new day, we have a new veto threat from the president.”

— Mitch McConnell

40. “It took us in this country 11 years to get from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution.”

— Mitch McConnell

41. “I think the important thing to remember here is that we haven’t been attacked again at home since September of 2001.”

— Mitch McConnell

42. “While other state governments stiff their vendors, close parks, delay tax refunds, and ignore unacceptably poor service levels, Indiana state employees are setting national standards for efficiency.”

— Mitch McConnell

43. “Obama hasn’t been working to earn reelection, he’s been working to earn a spot on the PGA tour!”

— Mitch McConnell

44. “The biggest problem confronting the country is our excessive spending. If we’re not going to deal with it now, when are we going to deal with it? And we’ve watched the government explode over the last four years. We’ve dealt with the revenue issue.”

— Mitch McConnell

45. “Mitt Romney has spent his entire life finding ways to solve problems.”

— Mitch McConnell

46. “The administration still wants to govern from the far-left and that’s going to produce kind a partisan result here in the Congress.”

— Mitch McConnell