Karl Rove

“You all had something to do with keeping me employed.”

“My parents, particularly my father, had been used by commentators, political journalists and political commentators, to attack me, and the collateral damage was the reputations of my father and my mother.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf - you know, not seen very often but often talked about.”

“Many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview.”

“I believe in traditional marriage.”

“Look, there ought to be politics in politics.”

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

“The fallback position in politics is if you don't know what you want to be about, and if you don't know what your vision is, go at somebody else.”

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

“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.”

“I supported Pat Toomey when he ran in 2010. I gave him money in September of 2009 because I wanted him to be the U.S. senator. I personally contributed my own money.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“'Empathy' is the latest code word for liberal activism, for treating the Constitution as malleable clay to be kneaded and molded in whatever form justices want. It represents an expansive view of the judiciary in which courts create policy that couldn't pass the legislative branch or, if it did, would generate voter backlash.”

“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.”