Quotations from Speaker Newt Gingrich: on Families & Children

Newt Gingrich: It's conceivable I was insensitive during my divorce

All I can say is when you've been talking about divorce for 11 years and you've gone to a marriage counselor, and the other person doesn't want the divorce, I'm not sure there is any sensitive way to handle it.
--The Washington Post, January 3, 1985

I'm willing to say, having one through the last five and six years and having understood that--as an incorrigible bulldozer-- it's conceivable I was that insensitive. It was never in any sense deliberate.
--Commenting on the story that he asked for a divorce while Jackie was in the hospital recovering from a cancer operation, The Washington Post, June 12, 1989

Newt Gingrich: Welfare system destroys the family; replace welfare state

So if you don't have a revolution, you're going to have a country which is decaying. And I think our goal is very simple. It is our goal to replace the welfare state. Not to reform it, not to improve it, not to modify it, to replace it. To go straight at the core structure and the core values of the welfare state, and replace them with a much more powerful, much more effective system.
--Remarks at the Young Republicans Leadership Conference, Washington D.C. March 19, 1992

Newt Gingrich: Families are not anything other than heterosexual couples

[The Republican Party's position] should be toleration. It should not be promotion and it should not be condemnation. I don't want to see police in the men's room, which we had when I was a child, and I don't want to see trying to educate kindergartners in understanding gay couples.

It is madness to pretend that families are anything other than heterosexual couples. I think it goes to the core of how civilization functions.
--The Washington Blade. November 25, 1994