Quotes About Barry Goldwater

During my life, I have had a few nightmares which happened to me while I was wide awake. One of them was the National Republican Convention in San Francisco, which produced the greatest disaster the Republican Party has ever known - Nominee Barry Goldwater.

Once the religious right got their beachhead in the Republican Party in 1980, they expanded it. Even Barry Goldwater was extremely hostile to the religious right, but Reagan catered to them. The religious right then expanded their base and that drove the moderates out.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And… moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.

Reagan's victory notwithstanding, the landslide loss by Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election makes it abundantly clear that conservative Republican values are falling out of fashion.

Toward the end of the 1964 presidential campaign, Reagan gives a speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. It was like a screen test for a new career.

Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.

The Republican decision to exploit the race issue and abandon the option of becoming a party of reform manifested itself in the 1961 speech in Atlanta by Barry Goldwater to a gathering of Southern Republicans. "We're not going to get the Negro vote as a bloc in 1964 and 1968, so we ought to go hunting where the ducks are," he declared.

In 1964, I tried to convince my grandfather, who was active in the New York City firefighters union, to vote for Barry Goldwater over Lyndon Johnson because at the time I thought his approach to limited government was right on.

He [Barry Goldwater] was called "the cheerful malcontent." It takes a rare and fine temperament to wed that adjective with that noun. His emotional equipoise was undisturbed by the loss of 44 states as a presidential nominee. Perhaps he sensed that he had won the future. We -- 27,178,188 of us -- who voted for him in 1964 believe he won, it just took 16 years to count the votes.

Southern Republicans are guided by the Bible. Western Republicans read the Constitution. Seen in historical terms, it's the difference between a movement descended from George Wallace and one that harks back to Barry Goldwater.

Throughout history, government has proved to be the chief instrument for thwarting man's liberty.

I have characterized Nixon as a loner, a cold man with great self-confidence and a one-track mind centered on the advancement of Richard Nixon.

The modern conservative movement was inspired by Barry Goldwater's canonical text from 1960, The Conscience of a Conservative.

Barry Goldwater famously argued that extremism in the defense of liberty was no vice. Our story will show that it is.