Top 40 Scott Walker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Well, we’re going to start in a couple weeks with our budget adjustment bill. The first step is we’re going to deal with collective bargaining for all public employee unions, because you use divide and conquer.”

— Scott Walker

2. “It’s time to put our differences aside and find ways to work together to move Wisconsin forward.”

— Scott Walker

3. “The music has to be as interesting. It has to keep taking you into places that you’re at least not used to.”

— Scott Walker

4. “My kids were targeted on Facebook by protesters.”

— Scott Walker

5. “The people who are making you feel under attack is your union leadership, and they’re doing it for politically intense reasons.”

— Scott Walker

6. “But I don’t want massive layoffs of anyone – public or private. We are planning on shrinking government through attrition and reform, not through random pink slips.”

— Scott Walker

7. “I still remember, as a kid, tying a yellow ribbon around a tree in front of my house during the 444 days that Iran held 52 Americans hostage. Iran is not a place we should be doing business with.”

— Scott Walker

8. “You hear some people talk about border security and a wall and all that. To me, I don’t know that you need any of that if you had a better, saner way to let people into the country in the first place.”

— Scott Walker

9. “Now things have changed for the better. Our reforms end seniority and tenure so we can hire and fire based on merit and pay based on performance. That means we can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms – and we can keep them there.”

— Scott Walker

10. “Chief executives that are successful make good chief executives.”

— Scott Walker

11. “You see, here in America there’s a reason why we celebrate the 4th of July and not April 15th because in America we celebrate our independence from the government, not our dependence on it.”

— Scott Walker

12. “People create jobs, not the government.”

— Scott Walker

13. “I don’t want to be a slave to history or facts. As long as I’m getting a good cursory understanding of what it is and I’m not drifting too far away at certain points, then I can play with the idea and take it anywhere I want to.”

— Scott Walker

14. “Washington, or as I like to call it, 68 square miles surrounded by reality.”

— Scott Walker

15. “Melodies are far more interesting. They are there, in your face, in certain sections of the songs. People do complain about the melody thing, but we do hit patches of melody and beauty, as well as the other stuff.”

— Scott Walker

16. “Every time I bring an album it’s like I’m bringing in the plague, once again. I don’t actually know what category it all falls into, but I’ve stopped worrying about it.”

— Scott Walker

17. “One of the things I get amused by is when my opponent talks about the middle class.”

— Scott Walker

18. “A wise governor told me a long time ago, political capital you don’t get more of by keeping it. You get it by using it.”

— Scott Walker

19. “I hate big government, but I really hate a government that doesn’t work. So when ‘they say we either have to raise taxes or cut core services,’ it’s actually a ’false choice.”

— Scott Walker

20. “Collective bargaining isn’t a right, it is an expensive entitlement. Once and for all, we are giving the taxpayers a voice in this debate. We put the power back in the hands of the people.”

— Scott Walker

21. “Matching sounds in your head is made a lot easier with all the technology. It is the nonelectronic noises that are challenging, as you have to find ways of communicating those to the people you’re working with.”

— Scott Walker

22. “I just think this is people who are chronically looking for ways to be upset about things...”

— Scott Walker

23. “Political leaders in Illinois kicked the can down the road, raised taxes, and ignored fiscal realities. Now, they’re realizing the consequences of their actions: credit downgrades and negative outlooks.”

— Scott Walker

24. “I believe that smaller government is better government. But I also believe that in the areas where government does play a legitimate role, we should demand that it is done better.”

— Scott Walker

25. “My problem with public sector union leaders, the bosses, has been they stood in the way of protecting the taxpayer.”

— Scott Walker

26. “In my teenage years I was as addicted to great pop as I was to free jazz, electronic music, and hardcore blues.”

— Scott Walker

27. “There could not be a more stark contrast between Wisconsin and Illinois.”

— Scott Walker

28. “I have unbelievable support among Republicans.”

— Scott Walker

29. “I have not made any plans for the future, and my wife would kill me if I announced anything before that.”

— Scott Walker

30. “I think in the end the big issue is that the private sector still needs more help. And the answer is not more big government. I know in my state our reforms allowed us to protect firefighters, police officers, and teachers.”

— Scott Walker

31. “When we win, it will tell every politician in America that if you are bold, if you do the right thing, if you tackle the tough issues, there will be people standing there right with you.”

— Scott Walker

32. “I’m not so in with the prescriptive avant-garde agenda. I can do that sort of thing, but I feel that I’m still interested enough in song structure. When I look at a lyric on the page, the lyric is alive to me, looking like soldiers in a field. I can move it around, and it’s very black-and-white.”

— Scott Walker

33. “So why am I facing a recall election? Simple: the big government union bosses from Washington want their money. They don’t like the fact that I did something fundamentally pro-worker; something that’s truly about freedom.”

— Scott Walker

34. “I joke with my kids, who love history, that I’ll be the only governor to be elected twice in his first term.”

— Scott Walker

35. “About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.”

— Scott Walker

36. “It all starts from the lyric with me. If I work really hard on the lyric and get it right, then it will tell me whatever else to do, where to go.”

— Scott Walker

37. “The harder part of doing a real story is that there are real people and you have a responsibility to not just go crazy with their lives and have them do things which are not their character, that they then have to live with.”

— Scott Walker

38. “We are the ones looking out for the middle class. Who do think pays for the endless expansion of government? Its middle class taxpayers. Our reforms protect middle class taxpayers.”

— Scott Walker

39. “Like many places across the country, Wisconsin lost more than 100,000 jobs from 2008 to 2010. Unemployment during that time topped out at over 9%.”

— Scott Walker

40. “I’d like now and into the future to play a bigger role not only in Wisconsin and the Midwest, but nationally. I’d like to have an impact.”

— Scott Walker

41. “But Mitt Romney understands, like I understand, that people – not governments – create jobs.”

— Scott Walker

42. “More people on unemployment benefits is not success in America, fewer people on not because we kicked them off but because they have been able to get a job in the private sector, because government got out of the way.”

— Scott Walker

43. “I promised to empower the taxpayer – instead of a handful of big government union bosses.”

— Scott Walker

44. “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

— Scott Walker

45. “You have phantom income each year. No money is being put in your pocket, but you have to take some money out of your pocket to pay Uncle Sam because the tax is paid based on accretion.”

— Scott Walker

46. “And I think Governor Romney has a shot if the ‘R’ next to his name doesn’t just stand for ‘Republican,’ it stands for ’reformer.”

— Scott Walker

47. “Governors should be defined not just by what they do and say, but who they surround themselves with.”

— Scott Walker

48. “I’ve often heard the complaint from both Democrat and Republican voters alike that they hate the fact that politicians get into office and they – and they’re fearful, they’re fearful to make tough decisions because they think more about the next election than they do about the next-generation.”

— Scott Walker

49. “Mitt Romney turned businesses around in the private sector. He saved the Winter Olympics.”

— Scott Walker