I think Karl Rove saw that in George W. Bush early on and understood the impact that he could have on Texas politics and probably on national politics.

George W. Bush is not only a great president; he was a great candidate.

I'm a dedicated Republican and a proud party man.

I believe we're the party of small business.

The fact is that we as a party at the Republican National Committee registered 3.4 million new voters in the past two years and brought them into the political process. The president won by 3.5 million votes.

The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation's history.

The Democratic Party is getting very angry, and that came through clearly in this election.

Our party may have swung too far right at various times.

And so it was interesting for me to find myself very enamored of a Republican president, but Ronald Reagan was someone I thought captured the spirit of America.

If Ralph Nader runs, President Bush is going to be re-elected, and if Ralph Nader doesn't run, President Bush is going to be re-elected. We're going to run on the president's strong and principled leadership and his positive agenda for a second term.

I don't believe we're the party of big business.

Well, my wife, Cathy Gillespie, worked for Joe Barton, who was running for Congress in 1984.

People like passion in politics.

I don't think we're as divided as many in the elite would have us believe.

I think one of the problems the Democrats have today is that they are an elitist party.

But I think there was a sense amongst the House Republicans especially that we didn't just want to be opposed to Bill Clinton; that we wanted to tell the country what we were for and to brand ourselves in a more positive manner.

Politics swings like a pendulum.

We are in favor of greater free markets.

I think Karl Rove saw that in George W. Bush early on and understood the impact that he could have on Texas politics and probably on national politics.

I do not believe the American people are going to confuse hatred for passion.

When you were a volunteer for the Bush-Cheney campaign, you came in the morning; you had a supervisor who gave you a list of calls to make and a time to do it in.

If you're a governor of a big state, people sense your presence a little bit, even your fellow governors.

So I think that our foreign policy, the president's strong and principled leadership when it comes to the war against terror and foreign policy is going to be an asset.

We are seeing at the Republican National Committee a phenomenon that is worth noting this week; maybe today, maybe tomorrow, maybe Wednesday, we will have a million first time donors since the president took office.

Well, I think the Republican Party is the more populist party.

When you look at where the Democratic field is going relative to foreign policy, they are increasingly moving away from a policy of pre-emptive self-defense that the president has adopted since September 11.

I'm an American first, and I think that's how most people are.

Texas is now a cornerstone of the electoral college for Republicans.

Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now.

They do believe that if we do not wage this war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it waged in Baltimore and Kansas.

One is that President Clinton, in his first two years of his term, did not govern as he had campaigned.

Even as a partisan Republican, I'm not sure a 40-year run is healthy for either party.

I don't want to be disrespectful of the president of the United States, but as a political person, one of the things I appreciated about this president, in the past year especially, is he is a fantastic candidate.

I accept people for who they are and love them. That doesn't mean I have to agree or that I have to turn my back on the tenets of my faith and reject the tenets of my faith when it comes to homosexuality.

On the other side, I do believe that the rhetoric we are seeing from the Democrats today is unprecedented, is a new low in presidential politics and goes beyond political discourse and amounts to political hate speech.

We aim in the domain of politics at republicanism; in the domain of economics at socialism; in the domain of what is today called religion, at atheism.

I have come to realize that Jesse Helms stands for everything in politics that is anathema to me.

Like religion, politics, and family planning, cereal is not a topic to be brought up in public. It's too controversial.

I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

We live in a world in which politics has replaced philosophy.

I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.

Hope springs eternal, even in politics.

Politics is about winning. If you don't win, you don't get to put your principles into practice. Therefore, find a way to win, or sit the battle out.

I don't think at my age... you can start ruling people out in politics.

The new generation of Labour is different. Different attitudes, different ideas, different ways of doing politics.

The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.

A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

Politics is the enemy of the imagination.