Top 80 Paul Ryan Quotes

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

People like me who are reform-minded ignore the people who say, ‘Just criticize and don’t do anything and let’s win by default.’ That’s ridiculous.

A Romney-Ryan administration will protect and strengthen Medicare, for my Mom’s generation, for my generation, and for my kids and yours.

In America, aren’t we all supposed to see beyond class, see beyond ethnicity? Are all these lines drawn to set us apart and lock us into groups?

So here’s the question: Without a change in leadership, why would the next four years be any different from the last four years?

We have got this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work, and so there is a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.

Behind every small business, there’s a story worth knowing. All the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores – these didn’t come out of nowhere.

To my great disappointment, it appears that the politics of division are making a big comeback. Many Americans share my disappointment – especially those who were filled with great hope a few years ago, when then-Senator Obama announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois.

Do we believe that the goal of government is to promote equal opportunity for all Americans to make the most of their lives? Or, do we now believe that government’s role is to equalize the results of peoples lives?

Our two party platforms were emphatic about Jerusalem being the capital of Israel. For the Obama administration to remove this language from the Democratic Party platform drives a wedge into one of the few issues that our two parties agreed on.

I am a pro-growth, constitutional, limited government conservative. So I’m going to speak out for what I believe in – the kind of inclusive, aspirational, optimistic politics which unites people.

I’m tired of divided government. It doesn’t work very well.

I believe that if we do not prevent Medicare from going bankrupt, it will go bankrupt. And that will be bad for everybody. We have to tackle our debt crisis. We have to tackle the drivers of our debt.

Look, only in Washington is not raising taxes considered a tax cut. Nobody’s getting a tax cut here. We’re not cutting taxes. We’re preventing tax increases from occurring.

Free enterprise empowers entrepreneurs who have ideas and imagination, investors who take risks, and workers who hone their skills and offer their labor.

And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.

The president has declared that the debate over government-controlled health care is over. That will come as news to the millions of Americans who will elect Mitt Romney so we can repeal Obamacare.

I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest.

By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation’s history, the President’s policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future.

When it comes to jobs, President Obama makes the Jimmy Carter years look like good old days. If we fired Jimmy Carter then, why would we rehire Barack Obama now?

There are a lot of regulations that are really just crushing jobs. Look at the coal miners in the Rust Belt that are getting out of work. Look at the – look at the loggers and the timber workers and the paper mills in the West Coast. Look at the ranchers or farmers in the Midwest with regulations.

Mr. Chairman, delegates, and fellow citizens: I am honored by the support of this convention for vice president of the United States. I accept the duty to help lead our nation out of a jobs crisis and back to prosperity – and I know we can do this.

What we heard today was not fiscal leadership from our Commander-in-Chief, what we heard today was a political broadside from our Campaigner-in-Chief.

A free economy and strong communities honor the dignity of every person, rewarding effort with justice, promoting upward mobility, and building solidarity among citizens.

I don’t want to get into the ‘who’s a hostage-taker’ discussion here, but what is the estate tax? It’s a double tax on death. Economists will tell you that it’s really not a tax that soaks the rich, but it’s a tax on capital that deprives business investment and therefore job creation.

We believe that the government has an important role to create the conditions that promote entrepreneurship, upward mobility, and individual responsibility.

In a clean break from the Obama years, and frankly from the years before this president, we will keep federal spending at 20 percent of GDP, or less. That is enough. The choice is whether to put hard limits on economic growth, or hard limits on the size of government, and we choose to limit government.

People have a constitutional right to have semiautomatic rifles.

The work ahead will be hard. These times demand the best of us – all of us, but we can do this. Together, we can do this. We can get this country working again. We can get this economy growing again. We can make the safety net safe again. We can do this.

The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand. The fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.

If you want to change a law, you have to pass a law. Presidents don’t write laws. Congress writes laws.

President Obama clearly cannot run on his record. All he’s offering is more of the same. That’s not good. Look at the economy. It’s stagnating. And so, what they’re now going to try and do is bring this campaign down to little things, distractions, distortions, smear, fear, anger, frustration.

We are in a global economy whether we like it or not. And we believe – I believe – that America should be at the table writing the rules of the global economy instead of China.

Conventional wisdom on government’s role in inequality often has it backwards. Tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive.

Obama is trying to paint us as a caricature, as if we’re some bizarre individualists who are hardcore libertarians. It’s a false dichotomy and intellectually lazy. Of course we believe in government. We think government should do what it does really well, but that it has limits.

What matters to me is that I do what I think is right and I see, I’m a numbers guy, that’s my attitude. I know we have a debt tsunami coming, we are bankrupting this country and I’m in a position where I can actually advance ideas to prevent that from happening. That’s exactly what I should be doing.

Everyone who feels stuck in the Obama economy is right to focus on the here and now. And I hope you understand this too, if you’re feeling left out or passed by: You have not failed, your leaders have failed you.

I cannot and I will not give up my family. I may not be on the road as often as previous speakers, but I pledge to make up for it with more time communicating our vision, our message.

I don’t consult polls to tell me what my principles are or what our policies should be.

The moral case for individual initiative in a free economy holds that people have a God-given right to use their creativity to produce things that improve our lives.

We do not have a functioning market in the true sense of the word in health care. That’s a layer of transparency that’s sorely needed in America.

Republicans have offered dozens of comprehensive healthcare plans many of which achieve comprehensive healthcare reform without breaking what’s working in healthcare. We want to fix what’s broken in healthcare.

What I’m concerned about is endless borrowing, which is going to compromise our economy not only today but in the future. Because we know the decisions we make right now really dramatically impact us in the future, and the debt is literally getting out of our control.

What’s missing is leadership in the White House. And the story that Barack Obama does tell, forever shifting blame to the last administration, is getting old. The man assumed office almost four years ago – isn’t it about time he assumed responsibility?

Mitt Romney and I know the difference between protecting a program, and raiding it. Ladies and gentlemen, our nation needs this debate. We want this debate. We will win this debate.

I’m going to speak my mind. I’m going to defend conservatism as I understand it. I’m going to defend our ideas as the Republican Party.

Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.

Look, the president is elected to lead and to face the country’s biggest challenges. The country’s biggest challenge domestically speaking, no doubt about it, is a debt crisis, and I’m really hoping that he is going to give us a budget that tackles this debt crisis.

We will not try to replace our founding principles, we will reapply our founding principles.

Everyone is equal. Everyone has a place. No one is written off, because there is worth and goodness in every life… That is the Republican ideal. And if we won’t defend it, who will?

Today, if you were raised poor, you’re just as likely to stay poor as you were 50 years ago.

If you’re running for president, you’ve got to do a lot of things to line up a candidacy. I’ve not done any of those things. It’s not my plan. My plan is to be a good chairman of the House Budget Committee and fight for the fiscal sanity of this nation.

If we don’t make tough decisions today our children are going to have to make much, much tougher decisions tomorrow.

If a person wants to be the nominee of the Republican Party, there can be no evasion and no games. They must reject any group or cause that is built on bigotry. This party does not prey on people’s prejudices.

The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it.

Every now and then, President Obama sorta drops his veil. He’s less coy about his philosophy, he sort of reveals his true governing philosophy, what he really believes.

A bold reform agenda is our moral obligation. If we make the case effectively and win this November, then we will have the moral authority to enact the kind of fundamental reforms America has not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first year.

We need to reclaim our American system of limited government, low taxes, reasonable regulations, and sound money, which has blessed us with unprecedented prosperity. And it has done more to help the poor than any other economic system ever designed.

While President Obama shirks his responsibility to advance solutions to our fiscal challenges, he can no longer hide from the merciless math of the balance sheet. Conservatives have made certain of that.

We believe, as our founders did, that ‘the pursuit of happiness’ depends upon individual liberty; and individual liberty requires limited government.

Class is not a fixed designation in this country. We are an upwardly mobile society with a lot of movement between income groups.

I really don’t have tremendous political ambition. I have policy ambition.

The debt and the deficit is just getting out of control, and the administration is still pumping through billions upon trillions of new spending. That does not grow the economy.

This debt crisis coming to our country. The wall and tidal wave of debt that is befalling our nation. Medicare and Social Security go bankrupt within ten years, we have a debt that is looming so high that in the last year of President Obama’s budget just the interest payments on our debt is $916 billion dollars.

We must solve the problem in health care by curbing out-of-control costs that erode paychecks for working families and push quality coverage out of reach for millions of Americans.

America is more than just a country. It’s more than Chicago or Wisconsin. It’s more than our borders. America is an idea. It’s a very precious idea.

I live on the same block where I grew up. We belong to the same parish where I was baptized. Janesville is that kind of place.

I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers.

Mom was 50 when my Dad died. She got on a bus every weekday for years, and rode 40 miles each morning to Madison. She earned a new degree and learned new skills to start her small business. It wasn’t just a new livelihood. It was a new life.

If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas. Don’t give me Ayn Rand.

My Dad, a small-town lawyer, was also named Paul. Until we lost him when I was 16, he was a gentle presence in my life. I like to think he’d be proud of me and my sister and brothers, because I’m sure proud of him and of where I come from, Janesville, Wisconsin.

I actually think you should run for president if you’re going to be president, if you want to be president. I’m not running for president. I made that decision, consciously, not to.

Exploiting people’s emotions of fear, envy and anxiety is not hope, it’s not change, it’s partisanship. We don’t need partisanship. We don’t need demagoguery, we need solutions.

In government-directed economies, the collective takes priority over the individual. The moral ideal is equal results. That approach could not be further removed from the real world.

We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

We are all representatives of the American people. We all do town hall meetings. We all talk to our constituents. And I’ve got to tell you, the American people are engaged. And if you think they want a government takeover of health care, I would respectfully submit you’re not listening to them.

Obamacare rewrote Medicare… so if you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well… What people don’t realize is that Medicare is going broke, that Medicare is going to have price controls… So you have to deal with those issues if you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare.

When I was waiting tables, washing dishes, or mowing lawns for money, I never thought of myself as stuck in some station in life. I was on my own path, my own journey, an American journey where I could think for myself, decide for myself, define happiness for myself.

Hope and change? We’re not doing that anymore. They’re doing attack and blame. And so, I just think people are going to see through this. They want real leadership. They want us to get this country on the right track.

Only by taking responsibility for oneself, to the greatest extent possible, can one ever be free, and only a free person can make responsible choices – between right and wrong, saving and spending, giving or taking.