Lawyers From The United States

"There will be no FEPC when the soldier gets back home, and I make that statement as one who has visited many of our armies and talked to literally hundreds of American soldiers."

"I state that the conduct of the Negro soldier in Normandy, as well as all over Europe, was disgraceful and that Negro soldiers have disgraced the flag of their country. They constitute roughly one-twelfth of the Ameri-can Army, yet they are guilty of more than half the crime in the Army."

"Mr. President, how does that compare with what happened during four years under German occupation? During four years while the German army was there, there were two cases of criminal assault, and in each case, the man guilty was apprehended and shot the very day the assault happened, while in the cases of American culprits, files would have to come back to Washington, the opposition of the Organization for the Advancement of Colored People would have to be faced, a fight against the infliction of the penalty would be made by the Communist Party, this group and that group, so that it would take seven or eight months before any sentence was carried out, and by that time the entire effect of the punishment would be lost."

"Negro soldiers would go to farmhouses and holler "Boche! Bache!" as if they were looking for Germans, call the men of the families out into the yards, and hold guns on them while they went in and criminally assaulted the women members of the family."

"In Europe, Negro soldiers are used principally as service troops behind the lines, and I state now, on the authority of many American officers, that they were lazy; that they would not work; that it was a mistake to send them to Europe, and furthermore, that they should be returned from Europe and sent to the Pacific, where there are races of color."

"The Negro soldier was an utter and dismal failure in combat in Europe. When I make that statement, it is not from prejudice. I am not prejudiced against the Negro."

"Who has won this war? Why should the white soldier, the warrior who has returned home after having achieved the greatest victory in history be penalized for political reasons?"

"This decision reveals an alarming tendency to destroy the sovereignty of the states. Our supreme court is usurping the legislative function, and Congress may yet prove the last citadel of constitutional government."

"When they return to take over, they desire more than anything else to see the integrity of the social institutions of the South unimpaired. They desire to see white supremacy maintained. Above all things, they do not desire to see the election laws of the South or the powers of the States in defining the qualifications of electors tampered with. Those boys are fighting to maintain the rights of the States. Those boys are fighting to maintain white supremacy and the control of our election machinery."

"I have no prejudice in my heart, but the white race is the superior race and the Negro race an inferior race and the races must be kept separate by law."

"A political organization is a transferable commodity. You could not find a better way of killing virtue than by packing it into one of these contraptions which some gang of thieves is sure to find useful."

"Good government is the outcome of private virtue."

"Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation."

"People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this,—that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it."

"The short lesson that comes out of long experience in political agitation is something like this: all the motive power in all of these movements is the instinct of religious feeling. All the obstruction comes from attempting to rely on anything else. Conciliation is the enemy."

"Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same—hardihood. Give them raw truth."

"It is just as impossible to help reform by conciliating prejudice as it is by buying votes. Prejudice is the enemy. Whoever is not for you is against you."

"Every generation is a secret society and has incommunicable enthusiasms, tastes and interests which are a mystery both to its predecessors and to posterity."

"When a man talks with absolute sincerity and freedom he goes on a voyage of discovery. The whole company has shares in the enterprise."

"Keith, a fellow outspoken progressive, had been a mentor to me in many ways."

"It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country [Hitler] in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted. The fact is that I'm not saying [Sept. 11] was a [U.S.] plan, or anything like that because, you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you."

"What role does faith play in my life and when do I talk about it? I talk about it when I'm asked about it. That's pretty much my rule. I don't - I believe that faith is important to Americans, but I also believe very firmly in that constitutional amendment which says Congress shall make no law establishing religion or abridging the free exercise thereof. So it's important in American life, I feel that it is absolutely inappropriate to impose my faith on anyone. But when people want to discuss matters of faith, I find myself willing to do that."

"I believe a message of solidarity, and economic opportunity, and prosperity is going to win out, and that`s what the Democratic Party stands for, and that is where we`re going to have our focus."

""Dumb as hell" - Richard Nixon described Thompson as not able "to interrogate unfriendly witnesses and would be outsmarted by the committee's Democratic counsel." (see: The transcripts of the Nixon tapes published in "Abuse of Power: The New Watergate Tapes".)"

"They say that God protects drunks and children. I would add young morons to that list."

"Minor surgery is surgery that someone else is having"

"I heard Senator Sam Irvin of Watergate fame say something that stayed with me: 'If you can paint a really good picture of a cow, you don't have to write the word "cow" under it.'"

"My daddy always said that a man who walks around with a smile on his face all the time can't possibly know what's going on."

"Teaching Latin to someone like me in high school was somewhat like trying to teach a pig to dance. It's a waste of the teacher's time and it irritates the pig."

"I looked down on a quilt of clouds, bordered on the horizon by the blood-orange streaks of the setting sun. As the steady hum of the engine drowned out the chatter around me, I realized that I would probably be thinking about the implications of Watergate for the rest of my life. For the country, and for me it had been a significant point in time. (page 263)"

"Not once did an off-the-record comment return to haunt me. For example, my relationship with Walter Pincus, editor of the New Republic, one of the nation’s most liberal magazines, developed to the point were he understood our conversations went off the record without my having to say so. I never divulged anything of great substance, but many of my comments about personalities and my own prejudices could have been extremely embarrassing had he (or others) betrayed my confidence. (page 236)"

"In hindsight, I have come to believe the discovery of the tapes may prove to be an historic event in more than one way. At a time when the United States government acknowledges that 2 million conversations were overheard by authorized eavesdroppers in a twelve month period, and at least an equal number were being recorded by private dectecies, suspicious spouses, corporate spies, special agents, and blackmailers; at a time when people like me conduct their lives under the assumption that their telephone lines are tapped; and at a time when devices such as the bug-in-the-martini-olive are proliferating, the disastrous consequences that flowed from Nixon’s fateful decision to record White House conversations may serve to awaken the nation to the threat posed to the little privacy that remains to us. (page 92)"

"After sleeping late on Sunday, I was back at my desk that afternoon. I had two prime considerations. First, I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee or that there was a significant bit of missing information that we lacked; experience taught me that matters of this importance do not usually fall into your lap without more complications that are immediately apparent. Second, if our information was legitimate, I wanted to be sure the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action. Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee. Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home. Buzhardt was the only White House staff member with whom I had had any substantial contact. He had been unassuming and straightforward in his dealings with me. He never tried to enlist me in any White House strategy, to suggest that I relay confidential information, or to so any of the things that were probably assumed by many of the so-called sophisticates in Washington. (page 86)"

"As I reflected further, I convinced myself that Nixon had not had prior knowledge to the break-in, nor of the cover-up that followed. Even if culpability reached dangerously close to the president, I reasoned, surely his top aides would have shielded him from damaging information, not just to protect themselves, but also to allow him to tell the nation, in the best faith, that neither he nor his chief advisors were involved. (page 39)"

"I was operating under the theory that, even though Baker had been responsible for my appointment, I was representing all three minority senators-Baker, Edward Gurney of Florida, and Weicker. If differences arose within the minority there was no question about where my loyalty lay and whose directions I would take, but I believed that I should try to respond to the wishes of Weicker and Gurney in every way possible. (page 25)"

"When five men were captured in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee early in the morning on Saturday June 17, 1972 I had just completed a three-year stint as an assistant United States Attorney in Nashville. Ironically I had resigned the day before the break-in. I was about to become an unpaid political worker- the middle Tennessee director for the reelection campaign of Sen. Howard Baker. (page 3)"

"We can't forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD. He clearly had had the beginnings of a nuclear program."

"We are always just one successful terrorist attack away from a nuclear disaster"

"I thought Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. I think this platform originally came out as a response to particularly Roe v. Wade because of that. Before Roe v. Wade, states made those decisions. I think people ought to be free at state and local levels to make decisions that even Fred Thompson disagrees with. That's what freedom is all about. I think Roe v. Wade hopefully one day will be overturned, and we can go back to the pre-Roe v. Wade days."

"Some of our folks went to Washington to drain the swamp and made partnership with the alligators instead."

"This country has shed more blood for the freedom of other people than all the other nations in the history of the world combined, and I'm tired of people feeling like they've got to apologize for America."

"The average 20-year-old serving us in Iraq knows more about their country's national security than the average 20-year political veteran serving in the Congress today."

"I'm not above acting like a seal every once in a while and waiting for the next fish, I just don't want to do it all the time."

"I often say after eight years in Washington, I longed for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood."

"Where I stand doesn't depend on where I'm standing."

"Congressman David Dreier: Will the gentlewoman yield? Norton: I will not yield, sir! The District of Columbia has spent two hundred and six years yielding!"

"For the sake of our future collective history I ask that we never forget this one great forefather who, regardless of his glory, never forgot to claim our suffering as his own; that son of a slave who never bowed down to tyranny; That compassionate king who went all over the world singing our own best song in solidarity with the best hopes of people everywhere longing for justice and equality and peace."

"I am thrilled to think about the visionary, loving excellence of his life, symbolized by his painstaking fluency in twenty-five languages-a life and a fluency that ignorant, hateful, totally wrong men, here, in America, sought to cancel with one word! And that one word was "communist"!"

"I want to remember and to praise his compassion and his defiance and the ever enlarging scope of his moral concern. Today, as the United States insists upon punishing the Arab peoples of Iraq, I want to embrace the lucid, principled commitment of his amazing life. I want to respect and fathom his declaration of himself as African. I want to follow him to the workers of England, whose cause he so passionately espoused. I want to watch him rushing again and again to the side of the miners of Wales. I want to intervene and shield him from the atrocious insults he endured at restaurants, concert halls, hotels, and the actual and the political attempts to lynch him. I want to join his studies of Marx and track his on-site inspection of Soviet efforts at equality for minority peoples. I want to cheer him on as he founded, just one year after I was born, the Council on African Affairs, which, for almost twenty years, was the sole United States organization devoted to assistance of African liberation struggles. I want to enjoy his twenty minutes of standing ovation triumphs onstage as Othello, or as himself, singing Negro Spirituals and Russian and Spanish folksongs. I want to understand and copy his devotion to the eradication of racist everything and his rejection and exposure of economic inequities everywhere. I need to honor his resistance to the stupidity of Harry Truman's Cold War and Joe McCarthy's un-American witch-hunt. I want to cheer as he becomes an honorary member of the C.I.O. and the International Longshoremen's Union. I want to shout when W.E.B. DuBois presents him with the 1952 Stalin Peace Prize."

"Today I wish to pay tribute to an astonishing, powerful forefather of all of us, an exemplary Black man, an unparalleled role model who studied, and mastered, twenty-five languages, including Chinese and Arabic, as well as East and West coast African languages. A great human being, an exemplary Black man who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University, a huge hero who twice made All-America in football, and who earned fifteen Varsity letters in six or seven other sports, besides. An exemplary Black man who sang like a God and comported himself like a king."