Barry Goldwater (1909 – 1998)
American politician.
Low education and low intelligence, Goldwater once declared to the delight of his equally well-upholstered followers, are the real causes of poverty. One wonders what he, who did not last out more than one year of college, would have done if a family fortune and a family business did not await him back home.
Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.
I used to receive a hundred calls a year from people who wanted me to get into the Green Room at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, because that's where the Air Force stored all the material gathered on UFOs. I once asked Curtis LeMay if I could get in that room, and he just gave me holy hell. He said, "Not only can't you get into it but don't you ever mention it to me again." Now, with the millions of planets that we know are up there, it's hard for me to believe that ours is the only goddam one that has things that can think walking around on it. So when people tell me they've seen UFOs, I don't say they haven't. In fifteen thousand hours of flying, I've never seen one, but I've talked to pilots who have. I talked to an airline crew that swore up and down that an object came alongside of them one night, and before they could do anything it vanished. We lost a military pilot who went up to intercept strange lights and never came back. His airplane disappeared, too. I won't argue for or against.
A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.
I'm the most underdog underdog there is.
[Barry Goldwater was] one of the giants of 20th century American politics... [he] blazed the trail for the type of conservatism that has dominated government for the better part of three decades.
The Goldwaterite picture of themselves, as of their hero, is as distant from reality as the rest of the private universe they are defending. The frontier virtues they claim to embody are as synthetic as the frontier they inhabit. Their desert is air-conditioned and landscaped; their covered wagons are Cadillacs; their chaps are from Abercrombie & Fitch; their money, like their candidate’s, is mostly inherited from grandpappy, or acquired with their wives. In their favorite campaign photos, on that horse and under that ten-gallon Stetson, looking into the setting sun, is no cowboy or even rancher but a Phoenix storekeeper. The Western trade he caters to, in business as in politics, is dude ranch.
I told Johnson and old colleagues on Capitol Hill that we had two clear choices. Either win the [Vietnam] war in a relatively short time, say within a year, or pull out all our troops and come home.
It is a fact that Lyndon Johnson and his curious crew seem to believe that progress in this country is best served simply and directly through the ever-expanding gift power of the everlastingly growing Federal Government. One thing we all know, and I assure you I do: that's a much easier way to get votes than my way. It always has been. It's political Daddyism, and it's as old as demagogues and despotism.
Similar assertions have often been attributed to Ronald Reagan. Some of the inspiration for such expressions may lie in "The Criminality of the State" by Albert Jay Nock in American Mercury (March 1939) where he stated: "You get the same order of criminality from any State to which you give power to exercise it; and whatever power you give the State to do things for you carries with it the equivalent power to do things to you."
I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones that do violence to the Constitution, or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden. I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can.
Unlike nearly every other politician who ever lived, anywhere in the world, Barry Goldwater always said exactly what was on his mind. He spared his listeners nothing.
When you say "radical right" today, I think of these moneymaking ventures by fellows like Pat Robertson and others who are trying to take the Republican Party away from the Republican Party, and make a religious organization out of it. If that ever happens, kiss politics goodbye.
Having spent 37 years of my life in the military as a reservist, and never having met a gay in all of that time, and never having even talked about it in all those years, I just thought, why the hell shouldn't they serve? They're American citizens. As long as they're not doing things that are harmful to anyone else... So I came out for it.
I'm liberal up to a degree, I think everybody should be free, but if you think I'll let Barry Goldwater move in next door and marry my daughter, you must think I'm crazy. I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.
My faith in the future rests squarely on the belief that man, if he doesn't first destroy himself, will find new answers in the universe, new technologies, new disciplines, which will contribute to a vastly different and better world in the twenty-first century. Recalling what has happened in my short lifetime in the fields of communication and transportation and the life sciences, I marvel at the pessimists who tell us that we have reached the end of our productive capacity, who project a future of primarily dividing up what we now have and making do with less. To my mind the single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom.
I always came away...with the impression that he was a great patriot and a truly fine human being.
He was your friend forever, but if your opponent, an implacable foe. He never changed.
Vietnam is about halfway around the world from Washington. It's as large as the major European nations, with nearly 130,000 square miles... Its ancient recorded history goes back to 111 B.C... We entered (that country) with considerable ignorance.
Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth. And let me remind you, they are the very ones who always create the most hellish tyrannies. Absolute power does corrupt, and those who seek it must be suspect and must be opposed. Their mistaken course stems from false notions of equality, ladies and gentlemen. Equality, rightly understood, as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences. Wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.