united-states-presidential-candidates-1944

"The law is bigger than money, but only if the law works hard enough."

"New York City isn't a melting pot, it's a boiling pot."

"No man should be in public office who can't make more money in private life."

"A good catchword can obscure analysis for fifty years."

"The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens."

"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the colour of their skin."

"Muriel Rukeyser called her life of Wendell Willkie "a story and a song.""

"Truly, the life of Norman Thomas has been one of deep commitment to the betterment of all humanity."

"Thomas has often been a civil liberties agency all by himself, and a most effective one."

"The struggle against demagoguery scarcely fits the St George-against-the-dragon myth. Our democratic St George goes out rather reluctantly with armor awry. The struggle is confused; our knight wins by no clean thrust of lance or sword, but the dragon somehow poops out, and decent democracy is victor."

"Roosevelt's New Deal was not the best alternative, but it certainly was a better alternative than had been offered to the problems of our times, and it was offered with an elan, a spirit that made things go and which tended to lift up people's hearts. In retrospect, I wouldn't change many of the criticisms I then made. Yet the net result was certainly the salvation of America, and it produced peacefully, after some fashion not calculated by Roosevelt, the Welfare State and almost a revolution."

"The American people will never knowingly adopt Socialism. But under the name of "liberalism" they will adopt every fragment of the Socialist program, until one day America will be a Socialist nation, without knowing how it happened."

"You're worse than Gene Debs...If I had my way, I'd not only kill your magazine but send you to prison for life."

"[Norman Thomas] great fear at this juncture in history was not that Roosevelt himself would lead America to fascism, but that his ‘ideal’ of ‘capitalistic collectivism’ could set the stage for it. The President, he argued, ‘in the best sense of the word, is an aristocrat’ whose ‘accent’ alone would disqualify him as a potential Fascist leader."

"Political activism is about what you do; a counterculture is about how you live and look at the world, and the two do not necessarily overlap at all. Thus, Jack Kerouac, the great countercultural of the '50s, was somewhat to the right of Joseph McCarthy; while Norman Thomas, the best-known socialist of the same decade, was as straight as Thomas E. Dewey."

"For I can assure you that in any war, even if it does not become a world war, I do not think there will be a victor who can do much. There may be one less badly off than the other. One side or the other may have sued first for peace. The destruction will be so great, the moral erosion of the experience will be so great, that it is idle to think you’ll find liberty, walking serenely among the corpses of the dead and the agonies of the dying. There are other things to do than that if we want democracy and freedom to live; there have to be other things to do than that."

"All our rulers have said that war is unthinkable, and then we think about it almost all the time. We’ve got to make it unthinkable."

"I shall not stir multitudes, but may persuade my readers when I say that democratic socialism, not sure of all answers, not promising sudden utopias, is the world's best hope."

"I now see Norman Thomas as indeed a liberal, but as a real, old-fashioned, unreconstructed liberal who believes in freedom and justice for everybody."

"You will keep America out of the hands of communists by what you do here, you will keep it by making it seem unnecessary to the disadvantaged. It has been the New Deal, it has been democratic socialism which has been a major force from keeping the world from communism."

"The problem that confronts some of you younger ones – you’ve got to find an alternative to war. War is something men have hated but yet cherished. Out of wars have come profit of various sorts, power, glory. Sometimes out of them has become a defense of freedom. But you will not get that out of the kind of war we fight now with the weapons that our great scientists have given us. We have got to find a substitute for war, and the substitute isn’t surrender."

"In no way was Hitler the tool of big business. He was its lenient master. So was Mussolini except that he was weaker."

"The ultimate values in the world are those of personality and no theory of the state, whether socialistic or capitalistic, is valid, which makes it master, not servant, of man."

"[B]oth the communist and fascists revolutions definitely abolished laissez-faire capitalism in favor of one or another kind and degree of state capitalism. In neither form, fascist or communist, did the masses, through any sort of democratic process, either as workers or citizens, control the basic means of production and distribution ."

"It is a rather fascist performance, to exclude a man [Thomas] who has been a loyal supporter of Russian recognition from the days when it was dangerous to support that cause in America down to today."

"Fascism glorifies both militarism and war. It is as surely a menace to the peace as to the liberty of mankind."

"When the state seeks to compel a man who believes that war is wrong, not merely to abstain from actual sedition, as is its right, but to participate in battle, it inevitably compels him, however deep his love of country, to raise once more the cry, "We ought to obey God rather than man". He acknowledges with Romain Rolland that he is the citizen of two fatherlands and his supreme loyalty is to the City of God of which he is a builder. Some conscientious objectors may substitute mankind or humanity for God, but their conviction remains the same; only the free spirit can finally determine for a man the highest service he can render."

"Such is the logic of totalitarianism... [that] communism, whatever it was originally, is today Red fascism."

"Stalin's infamous pact with his fellow dictator has at last made the issue plain: His Communism is the ally not the foe of Fascism; the enemy, not the friend of democracy and the worker's cause."

"You're worthy of the Land of Lincoln. And a man from Illinois is going to pass the bill, and I'll see that you get proper attention and credit."

"Over the course of American history, a handful of U.S. senators have been so consequential that they are remembered better than some presidents. Among them are Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Robert M. La Follette Sr., Everett Dirksen and Ted Kennedy. John McCain, who died Saturday, deserves to be the most recent addition to this exclusive company."

"When Daniel Webster died more than a century ago, a man who differed strongly with him on many public issues rose in Congress to say this in eulogy: "Our great men are the common property of the country." Everett Dirksen, of Illinois, was and is the "common property" of all the 50 States. Senator Dirksen belonged to all of us because he always put his country first. He was an outspoken partisan, he was an individualist of the first rank, but he put his nation before himself and before his party. He came to the Nation's Capital in 1932, and his public service spanned an era of enormous change in the life of our country. He played a vital part in that change. That is why it is so difficult to think of the Washington scene, of this Capitol, without him. Only his fellow legislators, the Senators and Representatives who have gathered here today and who mourn his loss across the Nation, know the full extent of his contribution to the process of governing this country. They know the time and concern he put into their bills, their causes, their problems. They know another side to Everett Dirksen--the side in the committees and behind the scenes where so much of the hard work and the hard bargaining is done, where there is so little that makes headlines and so much that makes legislation. Through four Presidencies, through the adult life of most Americans living today, Everett Dirksen has had a hand in shaping almost every important law that affects our lives."

"When I face an issue of great import that cleaves both constituents and colleagues, I always take the same approach. I engage in deep deliberation and quiet contemplation. I wait to the last available minute and then I always vote with the losers. Because, my friend, the winners never remember and the losers never forget."

"I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times."

"We have been through this biennial convulsion four or five different times over the past 10 or 12 years, and now it appears that we are going through this quiet agony all over again."

"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money."

"All of his senatorial colleagues were present and the galleries were packed on June 10, 1964, when Everett Dirksen rose to speak to the most far-reaching legislative proposal since the New Deal. The senior senator from Illinois was a celebrated orator, having honed a style since his high school years in Pekin that alternated homespun observations with rhetorical flights."

"The attorney general said that you were very helpful and did an excellent job and that I ought to tell you that I admire you. I told him that I had already done that for some time."

"Democrats today ignore the pivotal role played by Senator Dirksen in obtaining passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, while heralding President Johnson as a civil rights advocate for signing the bill. The chief opponents of the 1964 Civil Rights Act were Democrat Senators Sam Ervin, Albert Gore, Sr., father of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, and Robert Byrd who filibustered against the bill for 14 straight hours before the final vote."

"To what extent may we expect to have the economics of fascism without its politics?"

"The heretic may be very irritating, he may be decidedly wrong, but the attempt to choke heresy or dissent from the dominant opinion by coercing the conscience is an incalculable danger to society. If war makes it necessary, it is the last count in the indictment against war."

"There is the sharp and bitter division between Socialists and Communists, principally on the important question of method and tactics. In general, however, Socialists propose to bring about as rapidly as possible the social ownership of land, natural resources and the principle means of production, thereby abolishing the possibility of the existence of any class on an income derived not from work but from ownership. This does not necessarily mean that no man will have a home he can call his own. His right will rest on use and not on a title deed."

"After I asked him [a student] what he meant, he replied that freedom consisted of the unimpeded right to get rich, to use his ability, no matter what the cost to others, to win advancement. No decent society can tolerate that definition."

"We are socialists because we believe we live now in a world that requires a great deal of thoughtful planning ahead of time. We are socialists because we live in a world that is peculiarly interdependent, and to a degree quite unknown in earlier times. [...] We are socialists because we believe in this kind of world - in this anarchy of nations - we need to have a concept that the great purpose of life is to manage our extraordinary scientific and technological achievements and our resources for the common good. It’s not easy and it cannot be the byproduct of a game where everybody seeks the maximum profit for himself, either men or nations in that role."

"The similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini's corporative state or Hitler's totalitarian state are both close and obvious."

"By every test of civil liberty Russian life is at least as much regimented as in the Fascist countries. The press, schools, and radio are if anything more absolutely controlled. ... To strike is as dangerous in Russia as in Germany. . . ."

"Stronger than all the armies is an idea that's time has come. … The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!"

"Little known by many today is the fact that it was Republican Senator Everett Dirksen from Illinois, not Johnson, who pushed through the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In fact, Dirksen was instrumental to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964, 1965 and 1968. Dirksen wrote the language for the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing."

"There are gentle men in whom gentility finally destroys whatever of iron there was in their souls. There are iron men in whom the iron corroded whatever gentility they possessed. There are men—not many to be sure—in whom the gentility and the iron were preserved in proper balance, each of these attributes to be summoned up as the occasion requires. Such a man was Harry Byrd."

"We are socialists because we believe this income which we all cooperate in making isn’t divided as it ought to be. [...] We do reward men according to deed. We do reward or give to people according to need. No religion would be possible in which that wasn’t done. There are the young, there are the old, there are many whom we have to reward according to their need. But in spite of improvements that have been made, and especially perhaps by my liberal friends who aren't just sure how far to go...we still have a society where there's a great deal of reward not according to deed, not according to need, but according to breed - the choice of your grandfather is very important. And according to the successful greed, which operates not in terms of great contributions to men, but in terms of manipulations of one sort of another."