Gary Johnson Quotes

This is the demise of the Republican Party. This is an opportunity, I think, for the Libertarian Party to become a major party.

The fact that I got to be the CEO of a publicly traded company in the marijuana space, that was something that was completely unexpected. But very quickly, marijuana products medicinally compete with legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year. There's not been one documented death due to marijuana. Then on the recreational side, I've always maintained that legalizing marijuana will lead to less overall substance abuse because people will find it as such a safer alternative than everything else that's out there, starting with alcohol.

I share in their outrage and the outrage is that we don’t have a system that has a level playing field. That the government picks winners and losers and in the case of Wall Street what absolutely outrages me is the fact that these people that made such incredibly bad decisions, and I’m believing that these decisions were not necessarily criminal or I think they would have been prosecuted, but that they were just horrible decisions. That they should have been rewarded with failure. Meaning they should have lost all of their money. But they didn’t loose all of their money did they? We bailed them out at the tune of a trillion bucks. You and I. You and I bailed them out. They continue to receive their bonuses and that is … that is the outrage and I share in that outrage... Government should be a level playing field where all of us have the same advantages and the same threats if you will. Implementing the Fair Tax for example throws out the entire Federal tax system. No income tax, no IRS, no business tax, no corporate tax and isn’t the fact that some people pay tax and others don’t isn’t it it the fact that some corporations pay tax and others don’t that has us outraged. It’s just not fair. Let’s implement something that totally fair and in fact is a system where you make the more you consume the more Fair Tax you’ll pay. In a Fair Tax environment you’ll be incentivised to save money.

I've been a self-declared Libertarian since 1971. What was the old saying? That if you weren't a Democrat in college, you didn't have a heart. And if you weren't a Republican in later life, you didn't have a brain. Well, I happen to think libertarian kind of encompasses hearts and brains both. And that's what we all are about.

I really do think that the two-party system is broken. I don’t think Democrats are able to balance a checkbook these days. That’s it’s all about bigger government and higher taxes. And then Republicans with, I think, the social agenda. Look, whatever your social inclinations are just don’t force it on me. And I think the Republican Party has gotten really extreme in that category.

People don't realize that there is another choice.

The root of all evil, if you want to point at it, is politicians that are going to save you and I from terrorists, from illegal immigrants, from drugs. "Elect me, and I'll save you."

I happen to think that the world kind of looks down on Republicans for their social conservative views which include religion in government. I think that that should not play a role in any of this.

Politics is momentum. And we have right now straight line momentum.

The argument to raise taxes to pay back the debt, that's one thing, but my experience tells me that it's not possible. Government raises taxes, they're gonna spend that money in other places. I'm gonna do a better job at balancing revenues and expenditures... That was a responsibility that we had, but we prioritized what government should or shouldn't be doing and as a result of that, again showed a fiscal discipline that I don't think anyone else can demonstrate.

Fixing America is not an insurmountable task. It's actually about putting people first rather than politics. I wouldn't be involved in this if I didn't think that we can make a difference, and that it is easy, it's really easy to be principled and put the issues first and politics last.

It [America] was founded and I hope that it resurges the notion of liberty, the notion of freedom, the notion of a system that treats everyone equally. I think we move further and further away from that not closer and closer and that if we could all focus on that that would be the focus and we could actually accomplish that. And that’s what I talk about all the time. As governor of New Mexico I like to think that on a daily basis it was about a system that was gonna treat everybody equally as opposed to politics which you know is hit and miss and it’s politics it’s who you know as opposed to a system that provides that equality.

Everything that I did as Governor, and everything that I think needs to occur right now in the Federal Government, needs to be a cost-benefit analysis. What are we spending our money on, and what are we getting for what we're spending? I am of the belief that we are on the verge of a financial collapse. We can not repay fourteen trillion dollars in debt if we're spending one point six trillion dollars more than we're taking in this year and years to come. That is not sustainable... We landed on the moon, we can balance the federal budget. And that means cutting forty-three cents out of every federal dollar that we're currently spending.

I think the best thing the Federal Gov. can do when it comes to education K-12 is to abolish the Federal Department of Education. The Federal Department of Education gives each state about 11 cents out of every school dollar that every state spends but it comes with about 16 cents worth of strings attached. So what I think the country … people do not understand is it’s a negative to take federal money... So just get the fed. govt. out of education completely. Leave education to the states. Fifty laboratories of innovation and best practice and in my opinion we would have some fabulous innovation that would get emulated because we are all so competitive.

When you recognize that half of everything we're spending on law enforcement, the courts, and the prisons is drug related. What are we getting for that? Well, we're arresting one point eight million people a year in this country and we now have two point three million people behind bars in this country. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world and isn't this America; liberty, personal freedom, and responsibility that goes along with that? I think that when it comes to drug policy, we've thrown that notion out the window.