Mitch Daniels Quotes

We believe that government works for the benefit of private life, and not the other way around.

I certainly believe in limited government but protecting children against injury abuse is certainly inside my sphere of things that the government should do.

We must not falsely teach American history in our schools. We have a law requiring state textbook oversight to guard against frauds like Zinn, and it was encouraging to find that no Hoosier school district had inflicted his book on its students.

[Obama's reelection] would subject the country to what might be a fatal last dose of statism.

We say that anytime budgets are balanced and an ample savings account has been set aside, government should just stop collecting taxes. Better to leave that money in the pockets of those who earned it, than to let it burn a hole, as it always does, in the pockets of government

We do not accept that ours will ever be a nation of haves and have-nots. We must always be a nation of haves and soon-to-haves.

I refer to the debt - the new red menace. This time consisting of ink.

There is nothing inconsistent about having a conservative outlook and being vigorous.

The president's grand experiment in trickle-down government has held back rather than sped economic recovery. He seems to sincerely believe we can build a middle class out of government jobs paid for with borrowed dollars.

The president wasn't dragged anywhere, ... In reality, I think, it was his opposition which was dragged upstairs one step at a time from zero to this number that was very close to what the president proposed.

I took a vow of political celibacy.

The perverse presumption that places the burden of proof on the challenger of spending must be inverted, back to the rule that applies elsewhere in life: 'Prove to me why we should.

We designed both our state employee health plans and the one we created for low-income Hoosiers as Health Savings Accounts, and now in the tens of thousands these citizens are proving that they are fully capable of making smart, consumerist choices about their own health care.

Anything that strengthens the private sector vs. the state is protective of personal freedom.

Sure, things could always have been done better, but I just wish people would drop their political hammers for a few weeks, as happened in 2001, and work on the problem at hand

When business leaders ask me what they can do for Indiana, I always reply: 'Make money. Go make money. That's the first act of corporate citizenship. If you do that, you'll have to hire someone else, and you'll have enough profit to help one of those non-profits we're so proud of.'

We are tasked to rebuild not just a damaged economy, and a debt-ridden balance sheet, but to do so by drawing forth the best that is in our fellow citizens. If we would summon the best from Americans, we must assume the best about them. If we don't believe in Americans, who will?

We believe it wrong ever to take a dollar from a free citizen without a very necessary public purpose, because each such taking diminishes the freedom to spend that dollar as its owner would prefer.

If freedom's best friends cannot unify around a realistic, actionable program of fundamental change, one that attracts and persuades a broad majority of our fellow citizens, big change will not come

We are taking challenges and turning them into opportunities by developing homegrown, local energy production to become independent from foreign sources.

Our fiscal ruin and resulting loss of world leadership will, in their [liberals'] eyes, be not a tragic event but a desirable one.