The 20 Best Quotes from Rush Limbaugh

In honor of the third anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s death…

On Saturday, Rush Limbaugh’s brother David put up this quote:

I didn’t realize that it had been three years since “the Great One” passed away on Saturday.

If you’re young, it’s hard to even understand the impact that Rush Limbaugh had on a generation of conservatives.

Personally, when I went to college, I was a moderate with generally uninformed political opinions, but an interest in practical solutions. I felt like I was getting the liberal perspective from my liberal professors in college, and I decided to listen to Rush to get the conservative perspective. Not only did he quickly turn me to the Right, but I later had the confidence to start what turned out to be an extraordinarily successful conservative website (Rightwingnews.com) despite not having any real credentials because I figured, “If Rush can be the most successful conservative radio host in America with just a high school degree, why can’t I create a conservative website?”

Rush Limbaugh was incredibly influential, had an extraordinary mind and despite all the false claims from the Left that he was “hateful” or “angry,” he became an incredibly positive force for America by creating and shaping so many conservatives. Like all of us, he wasn’t perfect, but wow… did he have an impact in the time he was here.

With all that in mind, here are the best quotes from one of the most influential conservatives of the last fifty years.

20) "Conservatism is an active intellectual pursuit; it requires constant vigilance. It has nothing to do with feelings. Liberalism is the most gutless choice you can make. You just see suffering and say, 'Oh, I feel so horrible!'"

19) "Liberals always exempt themselves from the rules that they impose on others."

18) "The liberals, you see, do not want to confront conservative ideas; they just attack conservatives as a group, and particularly their motives. If you believe what they say about us, you would think that if someone like Bill Bennett, or Jack Kemp, or myself were driving through South Central Los Angeles and looking at the slums and poverty, we would go: Oh, man, this is great - they've got nothing, so that means we get more. It's simply preposterous. We all want to live in a great country. And for the country to fulfill its potential, you need individuals to be the best they can be - not the government taking care of people."

17) "For government to give, it must first take away."

16) "The last thing in the world someone should do is respond to critics. If I did that I'd be neutered by now - I would be in the nearest insane asylum wearing 15 straitjackets. My whole career has been nothing but: "You shouldn't do it that way, you bigot, you sexist, you homophobe, you pig, you right-wing warmonger, you whatever."

15) "In life or in football, touchdowns rarely take place in seventy-yard increments. Usually, it's three yards and a cloud of dust."

14) "Liberals get credit for good intentions, and that's about it because everything they do fails."

13) "This is so classic. Government comes along under the guise of fairness, fixes something, gonna make it fair, gonna make it equal, gonna make it affordable, maybe even make it free. What they end up doing is blowing it all to hell, screwing it up worse than it's ever been screwed up, then their voters bellyache and complain about it. And the same Democrats come back and demand that something be done because their voters need a second chance."

12) "Morality is not defined and cannot be defined by individual choice."

11) "If Thomas Jefferson thought taxation without representation was bad, he should see how it is with representation."

10) "The Democrats need poor, dependent people if they're gonna stay in business. And if we don't have enough poverty at home, we'll import it. That's what our open-borders policy is: It's about importing poverty and importing the number of potential registered voters for the Democrat Party."

9) "Capitalism is always evaluated against dreams. Utopia is a dream. It doesn't exist."

8) "No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity."

7) "You know why there's a Second Amendment? In case the government fails to follow the first one."

6) "End results that work that don't involve government threaten liberals."

5) "I'm not opposed to the protection of animals. But the best way to do that is to make sure some human being owns them."

4) "In a country of children where the option is Santa Claus or work, what wins?"

3) "The world's biggest problem is the unequal distribution of capitalism. If there were capitalism everywhere, you wouldn't have food shortages."

2) "Liberals measure compassion by how many people are given welfare. Conservatives measure compassion by how many people no longer need it."

1) "What about feeling sorry for those who pay the taxes? Those are the people NO ONE ever feels sorry for. They are asked to give and give until they have no more to give. And when they say 'Enough!' they are called selfish."

---