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. – Karl Rove
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. – Karl Rove
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
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
What Mr. Obama wants in a nominee isn’t really ’empathy’ and ‘understanding.’ He wants a liberal, activist Supreme Court justice. – Karl Rove
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
For a person who promised hope and civility in politics, Mr. Obama has shown a borderline obsessiveness in blaming Mr. Bush. – Karl Rove
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
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. – Karl Rove
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
I left the White House in 2007. You know, I knew when I went there that it would be for a limited period of time. I was grateful that the average tenure of a white house senior aide is 18 to 20 months. I was there for nearly seven years. – Karl Rove
I think wealthy conservatives are busy investing in profit and job creation and enterprise, and wealthy liberals, many of them either from the media industry themselves or from – they recognize the value of communications and are more ready to put money into a less profitable enterprise, namely the media. – Karl Rove
I’ll never get out of politics. I have friends in public office. I have things that I want to do. You can’t go back in life. I won’t go back to the existence I had before of running a political consulting firm and signing up clients and advising campaigns in exactly that way. – Karl Rove
In Europe and the United States, you’ve got different systems to select candidates, and no system is perfect. – Karl Rove
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
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
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
‘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. – Karl Rove