19th-century Politician Quotes

Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.

At present, financial crises occur, chiefly because the paper currency is redeemable in gold only.

John Buchanan Robinson

By common consent of the nations, gold and silver are the only true measure of value. They are the necessary regulators of trade. I have myself no more doubt that these metals were prepared by the Almighty for this very purpose, than I have that iron and coal were prepared for the purposes in which they are being used.

On being asked by Mr Stephen Spender in the 1930s how best a poet could serve the Communist cause:

Go to Spain and get killed. The movement needs a Byron.

There is never a duel with truth; the truth always wins, and we are not afraid of it!

Dudley Field Malone

Sir, there have existed, in every age and every country, two distinct orders of men—the lovers of freedom, and the devoted advocates of power.

I know I will be severely criticized by the interventionists in America when I say we should not enter a war unless we have a reasonable chance of winning.... We are no better prepared today than France was when the interventionists persuaded her to attack the Siegfried Line....
It is not only our right but it is our obligation as American citizens to look at this war objectively and to weigh our chances for success if we should enter it. I have attempted to do this, especially from the standpoint of aviation; and I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we extend.

Burton K. Wheeler

Eleven months' hard work and one month's acute disappointment.

On gardening

Sir John Heathcoat-Amory, 1st Baronet

Definition of an independent Member of Parliament, viz. one that could not be depended upon.

Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby

If judge and jury had to hang the prisoner themselves in cold blood, there would be fewer executions; if we each had to butcher our own meat, there would be a great increase in the number of vegetarians.

Ernest Howard Crosby

This war is really the greatest insanity in which white races have ever been engaged.

Alfred von Tirpitz

To be haunted by past failures or satisfied with past successes is to arrest forward motion.

It is proposed to pay $7,200,000 for a country where none but malefactors will ever live, and where we are likely to be at constant war with the savages.

Discussing whether to appropriate funds for the acquisition of Alaska, U.S

Cadwallader C. Washburn

Statistics are like alienists — they will testify for either side.

Fiorello La Guardia

The greatest curse that can befall a free people, is civil war.

Alexander H. Stephens

An honest politician is one who when he's bought stays bought.

This is about an admitted attempt, encouraged from outside, to challenge and break the State's authority. That is intolerable. Whoever deviates from this policy that I have established, privately or publicly, will be expelled from the Union Nationale.

Maurice Duplessis

I am still an Irish rebel to the backbone and the spinal marrow, a rebel for the same reason that John Hampden and Algernon Sidney, George Washington and Charles Carrol of Carroltown, were rebels—because tyranny had supplanted the law.

Arriving in Australia in 1856

Charles Gavan Duffy

There was never a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

Randolph Bedford

He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbor without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile. He was a Caesar, without his ambition; Frederick, without his tyranny; Napoleon, without his selfishness, and Washington, without his reward.

Benjamin Harvey Hill

You damned fools. You can either vote for me for mayor or you can go to hell.

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government.

David Davis (Supreme Court justice)

Your eyes were filled with love, Kate Vane;
Ah, would that we were young again!

Thomas Dunn English

I expected to find a contest between a government and a people: I found two nations warring in the bosom of a single state.

Of Canada

John Lambton, 1st Earl of Durham

They love him most for the enemies he has made.

Edward S. Bragg