Quotes: Alan Keyes

Politics is not a horserace. The voters are not supposed to pick the winner, they are supposed to determine the winner. - Alan Keyes

Interviewer: "How do you turn the enthusiasm of these people in this room and the enthusiasm of the people who greet you around this state into actual votes on primary day on Tuesday?"
Keyes: I cant do it. I can just offer what I believe is a right and conscientious alternative for the country. The only people that can change the outcome of the vote is the voters. People are always telling me they want integrity, they want someone who will stand for principle and so forth. When are you guys going to stand for principle? You give away your votes to people you don't believe in on the basis of some stupid calculation about who's going to win. And then you complain when you get politicians who don't have principles. They'll have principles when you have principles. They'll stand for something when you are willing to give your vote on the basis of your heart and conscience and not let it be bought and sold by anything or any one. And if we can have that kind of integrity as voters, we'll get that kind of integrity from our representatives in the government, but not until then.

Polls had Bush winning 70% in Iowa. He didn't get anywhere near that percentage. People forget that these polls LIED to us. And people were herded like sheep to vote for a candidate who's best argument was 'I'm the winner.' If all of the people who voted for Bush because he was going to win didn't vote for him, he wouldn't have won. - Alan Keyes

I believe that there are certain circumstances in which the death penalty is in fact essential to our respect for life. If we do not in our law send the message to everybody that by calculatedly, coldly taking a human life in a way that, for instance, assaults the structures of law in a society, or shows a cold-blooded and studied disregard for the value of that life, if we are not willing to implement the death penalty in those circumstances, then we are actually sending a message of contempt for human life. - Alan Keyes

"So I'll tell you outright. I'll tell you outright. The first principle of a Keyes administration, it will apply in foreign policy, it will apply in domestic policy, it will apply everywhere. There is a God, and we are not him! I will not join the Clinton Democrats who worship government as their god! I will not join the Dole Republicans who worship power as their god! I will not join the Forbes Republicans who worship money as their god! I will stand where the founders of this nation stood, and I will give my respect and allegiance to the creator God who is the ground of justice and who is the ground of all our human rights!" -- Alan Keyes speaking to 
the Louisiana Republican Convention, Jan 27, 1996 

Most importantly, we must remember that freedom from constraint or coercion is itself not the ultimate blessing of the American political order. After all, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are not constrained by the coercion of positive law or tyrannical power. 
Presumably the blessings of liberty that are the inheritance of the American citizen are not merely the liberty of the wild animal. It is the absence of bars that makes a beast free -- but only the truth can make a man free. - Alan Keyes

Government is a practical entity - the only reason it needs to know things is so that it can do something about them. Whenever we grant, in principle, that the government has a right to know, we are granting it has a right to control.
- Alan Keyes

When a society begins to generate new laws, it is almost always a sign that it has previously begun to generate new evils. - Alan Keyes

The moral damage caused by judges will not cease until the people and their representatives remember that judges, too, are required to respect the fundamental principles on which the nation is founded. - Alan Keyes

Judges become part of a community that defines ideological growth as the abandonment of conservative principles. - Alan Keyes

Abraham Lincoln taught us that, in times of crisis, the Constitution need not be a suicide pact. - Alan Keyes

I, for one, would rather merely watch the triumph of evil in sorrow than be implicated in helping bring about that triumph. - Alan Keyes

If the Republican party refuses to stand [where God wants us to stand], [I] will not join them in their abandonment of truth. - Alan Keyes

The only thing that keeps us now from victory is the half-heartedness of those who have the spotlight on behalf of the Republican Party. - Alan Keyes

Electoral success is ultimately meaningless except in the service of the truth. - Alan Keyes

Do the right thing, because it is the right thing, and trust confidently in God to reward the right in His own good time. - Alan Keyes

you not only measure your successes by the good that you do, ...
you can also measure your successes by the evil that you prevent. - Alan Keyes

How compassionate is it to approach a society and say that for the sake of my indulgence
in sexual passion that society must abandon the very foundations of moral life which 
separate that moral life from anarchy and self destruction? - Alan Keyes

We cannot afford to guide our steps according to the opinions of the world or according 
to the opinions of those who are today the masters of the world's praise. - Alan Keyes

This is the plainest common sense and we are far-gone down the road of ideology, indeed, when we have become propagandized into thinking that the very use of energy is suspect. Such suspicion is, along with abortion, perhaps the clearest manifestation of the socialist death wish. The left seems often to think that the perfect state of human existence would be to successfully prevent the introduction of new life and any sign of metabolism in those who have the questionable good fortune to exist. - Alan Keyes, on global warming

Before we can triumph, we must survive. Before liberty can prevail, the possibility of liberty must be preserved. . . . Shall we hand off the future of America once again to those who have already tried to strike death blows against its heart, against its conscience, against its national security, or shall we work hard to make sure that that opportunity for destruction is taken out of their hands?" - Alan Keyes, America's Unity Call

If the Declaration of Independence states our creed, there can be no right to abortion, since it means denying the most fundamental right of all to human offspring in the womb. The Declaration states plainly that we are all created equal, endowed by our Creator with our basic human rights. But if human beings can decide who is human and who is not, the doctrine of God-given rights is utterly corrupted. Abortion is the unjust taking of a human life and a breach of the fundamental principles of our public moral creed. Abortion advocates strive constantly to raise a cloud of exceptions, passions, circumstances and "viability" standards to obscure this simple fact. But none of these distractions coherently imply that only some human offspring have rights that we must respect while others do not. Might does not make right. And the mere fact that the person in the womb is wholly in its mother's physical power -- and completely dependent on her for its sustenance -- gives her no right whatsoever with respect to its life since the mere possession of physical power can never confer such a right. 
- Alan Keyes

[W]e will not long respect the rights of anybody if we give ourselves permission to disrespect the rights of the unborn. - Alan Keyes

Despite all the evil to be found in the history of America, the redeeming feature of the American heritage lies right there at its beginning. By the providence of God, our nation was founded by a generation as weak, sinful, and complicit in injustice as any other. Yet they were endowed with this, at least: that they had the courage to acknowledge the truth by which their sins were condemned. They had the courage to acknowledge the God by which their failings would be judged. - Alan Keyes

[S]elf-government is not simply a machine -- it is also a living thing whose parts are human beings and whose right operation depends on their integrity.

- Alan Keyes

[A]bortion isn’t just another issue. It’s like slavery in the 19th century; it’s about our commitment to what defines us as a people and a free country. I think it’s the most important issue of our time.
- Alan Keyes

Violating the dignity of other human beings for the sake of benefits to our own  health and comfort is simply to choose greed over justice, whether the profit to  us is the cash crop of cotton or high-tech medicine. 

- Alan Keyes

The evil that we fight is but the shadow of the evil that we do.
- Alan Keyes

...the works of charity did not have as their objective to feed and to cloth in a physical sense; they have as their objective to give glory unto God so that we can achieve the conversion of hearts to Jesus Christ. ...I am afraid that when we move this into a government sphere, we are in danger of letting the glory go to the government that should really belong to God.
- Alan Keyes

[T]hough immigration has determined the composition of the American people, it does not define the characteristics of our national identity.
- Alan Keyes