Politicians From Illinois

"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and you can't change human nature from intelligent self-interest into pure idealism—not in this life; and if you could, what would be left for paradise?"

"In the last analysis sound judgment will prevail."

"The House of Representatives, in some respects, I think, is the most peculiar assemblage in the world, and only a man who has had long experience there can fully know its idiosyncrasies. It is true we engage in fierce combat, we are often intense partisans, sometimes we are unfair, not infrequently unjust, brutal at times, and yet I venture to say that, taken as a whole, the House is sound at heart; nowhere else will you find such a ready appreciation of merit and character, in few gatherings of equal size is there so little jealousy and envy. The House must be considerate of the feelings of its Members; there is a certain courtesy that has to be observed; a man may be voted a bore or shunned as a pest, and yet he must be accorded the rights to which he is entitled by virtue of being a representative of the people. On the other hand, a man may be universally popular, a good fellow, amusing and yet with these engaging qualities never get far. The men who have led the House, whose names have become a splendid tradition to their successors, have gained prominence not through luck or by mere accident. They have had ability, at least in some degree; but more than that, they have had character."

"Not one cent for scenery."

"In legislation we all do a lot of swapping tobacco across the lines."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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!"

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

"Friends of mine are always showing me articles. "Look at what this bigoted bastard wrote!" And then I dug something. Liberals will buy anything a bigot writes. And they'll really support it. George Lincoln Rockwell, the head of the American Nazi Party, perhaps is a very knowledgeable businessman with no political convictions whatsoever. He gets three bucks a head and works the mass rallies of nothing but angry Jews, shaking their fists and wondering why there are so many Jews there. And he probably has two followers who are deaf. They think the swastika is an Aztec symbol."

"This quixotic quality of Rockwell's movement, with equal measures of fantastic daring and pathological resentment, has enabled the racist Right to make a hero of him, something of a martyr (assassinated by one of his own followers, no less). But there is something about Rockwell's story— about his persistence in his beliefs and in his political activism—that seems heroic in a peculiar but genuine way, if only because one has to grant a man some measure of respect for sticking to his guns no matter what and for refusing to submit to the belief of the dominant mainstream that he was crazy because he adopted execrable political ideas (psychotherapy has sometimes become a form of Stalinism in democratic, technological countries). And there is something tragic about Rockwell, a man of no small intelligence, no small ambition, no small abilities, who could waste himself so thoroughly in something so grotesque and so mean-spirited."

"George Lincoln Rockwell is an egocentric and a chronic failure who created the shabby, small-time enterprise which he named the American Nazi Party in order to abate his tormenting ambitions to achieve fame. Carrying the war-tattered banner of a vanquished enemy the world would like to forget, Rockwell leads his heterogeneous "army" against an imaginary "Zionist conspiracy." Distasteful costumes, contemptible slogans, and disruptive tactics have brought national attention to Rockwell, inflating him and his group far beyond their due."

"We must appreciate the irony of Rockwell, an agnostic, using biblical allusions to promote Hitler, an anti-Semitic Odinist, as spiritual heir to Jesus of Nazareth, a radical Jewish rabbi."

"Without question Lincoln is the loudest talker on the campus, the originator of more weird theories than anyone else, and the Academy's outstanding artist. A memorable noise (whether or not it is pleasant is up to you) from Sturtevant Home is Lincoln Rockwell playing (?) sweet (?) music on the ivories of a nearby piano. He is the chief lover of classical music in the school; a champion rodent trainer, and an accomplished humorist. The two Rockwells started a new communication system here which, because of some arch-fiend, had only a brief existence. Rockwell is like his comedian father—always on hand with a joke or always ready with a kind word. He is headed for Harvard, they say, and we have every assurance of his being successful because of his incomparable personality and originality."

"George Lincoln Rockwell's talent was that he knew what would make people hate him. [...] [He] had an inordinate capacity for finding out what would make people the angriest and exploiting it."

"In between the Nazis and the Communists is the great mass of non-fanatics, the TV watchers and the comic book readers."

"Out of the mud and slime of lies, your holy red, white and black Swastika has been flung back into the skies in Virginia, United States of America, and we pledge you our lives, Adolf Hitler, that we shall not flag or fail until we have utterly destroyed the forces of Marxism and darkness."

"In Mein Kampf I found abundant 'mental sunshine' which bathed all the gray world suddenly in the clear light of reason and understanding. Word after word, sentence after sentence stabbed into the darkness like lightning bolts of revelation, tearing and ripping away the cobwebs of more than thirty years of darkness; brilliantly illuminating the heretofore obscure reasons for the world's madness. I was transfixed, hypnotized. I could not lay the book down without agonies of impatience to get back to it. I read it walking to the squadron, I took it into the air and read it, propped up on the chartboard, while I automatically gave the instructions to the other planes circling over the desert. I read it on the Coronado Ferry. I read it into the night and resumed the next morning. When I had finished, I started again and reread every word, underlining and marking especially magnificent passages. I studied it, thought about it and wondered at the utter, indescribable genius of it. How could the world not only ignore such a book, but damn it and curse it and hate it, and pretend that it was a plan for 'conquering' the world, when it was the most obvious and rational plan for saving the world which has ever been written? Had nobody read it, I wondered, that people went around saying it was the work of a mad "rug-chewer"? How could sensible people get away with such monstrous intellectual fraud? Why was it so hated and cursed? I could see why the Jews would hate and curse it, but why my own people? I reread and studied it some more. Slowly, bit by bit, I began to understand. I realized that National Socialism, the iconoclastic worldview of Adolf Hitler, was the doctrine of scientific, racial idealism, actually, a new 'religion' for our times. I saw that I was living in the age of a new worldview. Two thousand years ago there had been a similar rise of a new approach or worldview, called a 'religion'; a worldview which shook and changed the world forever."

"the problem in building a political organization … in spite of the enemy's utter mastery of all means of communicating with the masses, is … first the problem of reaching the masses—any way at all. It does not matter how you reach them at first, so long as they come to know of you and the fact that you are at the opposite pole from those in power."

"By the exercise of REASON and GUTS instead of wild emotion and "righteous wrath" at the illegal incarceration, I won over the Dr's. under Shultz and the lady liberal psychiatrist, and these people had the courage to defy the two top-bosses and declare I was sane in TEN DAYS, in spite of the hysteria of the Chief of Psychiatry, who was shouting, "You're SICK! SICK!! SICK!" even as I left the lock-up."

"Knowing this, we know that the psychiatrist, when he gets hold of you, is going to be looking for these "delusions of grandeur" and "delusions of persecutions". He is going to be waiting like a cat at a ratio hole for you to come out with the slightest hint that YOU, (instead of the Jews) are chosen to fulfill an historical mission such as preserving the White Race, and the concomitant proposition that the Jews are "persecuting" you for trying to expose them."

"It is part of the Jews to be sneaky and sly. The genius of our people has ever been joyous strength, robust forcefulness, directness, manly courage, and flaming heroism. When the Jews, with their economic terrorism, jails, bullies and hangmen, scare the White man into laying down his cudgel and goad him into trying to out-sneak Jewish tyranny, the Jews have completely emasculated the once-strong White man, and doomed him to dishonor and defeat. The White man can NEVER win by sneaking!"

"Let us stand on the scaffold of history — if hang we must — like the martyrs of Nuremberg, tall and proud! Is life so sweet, is comfort so precious and a job in a Jewish counting house so sacred that we are AFRAID to grasp the mighty hand of ADOLF HITLER reaching down to us our of our glorious past?"

"If we are to be the last of the white men who conquered the world; if we are finally to be overwhelmed by a pack of rats, let us at least face the death of our race as our ancestors faced their death---like MEN. Let us not crawl down amongst the rats begging for mercy or trying to out-sneak them and pretend to be rats ourselves!"

"I suggest that you instruct your people to see me openly, honestly, and that we join in an open, honest, and successful fight to destroy Israel the way it must be destroyed, by cutting off the parasite’s blood."

"Nazism says that women are absolutely equal to men. But they're different. And thank God for the difference."

"The purpose of life is to struggle as hard as you can for what you believe in and enjoy the struggle."

"You're a slave in your own country, White Man. Each year you get to keep less of the fruits of your labor; each year it gets more difficult to carry the burden the aliens have placed upon you; each year the cheap labor of aliens makes your future less secure; each year you retreat a few steps more into the world of slavery. Where will it all end? I'LL TELL YOU –­ it will end with the complete and total annihilation of "Whitey.""

"LOVE, the natural, healthy kind, is indeed what makes the world go round, and is the most beautiful, holy miracle we ever see here on this earth. BUT WITHOUT A DEADLY HATE OF THAT WHICH THREATENS WHAT WE LOVE, LOVE IS AN EMPTY WORD, A CATCHWORD FOR HIPPIES, QUEERS, AND COWARDS."

"The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West."

"When I was in the advertising game, we used to use nude women. Now I use the swastika and storm troopers. You use what brings them in."

"Jews talk a lot about God. But actually their god, just like Marx said, is money. Cash!"

"I don't believe in democracy. In the second place, neither did our white forefathers. I believe, as they did, in a republican authoritarian republic with a limited electorate - just like the one the writers of our Constitution meant this country to be. When these white Christian patriots sat down to write the Declaration of Independence, there were no black citizens for them to worry about."

"In Germany, Hitler produced a local "lab experiment"; he provided me with an ideology in the same way that Marx provided one for Lenin. My task is to turn this ideology into a world movement."

"Evolution shows that in the long run, if the superior mixes with the inferior, the product is halfway between, and inferior to what you started with in the original superior group - in other words, mongrelized."

"Being prepared to die is one of the great secrets of living."

"A leopard doesn't change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn't pay to forget that he'll always be what he was born: a wild animal."

"Our motto continues to be: 'White Man, stand with us and fight, or stand out of our way!'"

"But when the survival of a whole people is at stake, as the survival of White, Western, Christian civilization is now at stake -- there IS no "moral" and "immoral". The only immoral thing is to permit an enemy to destroy one's people, either by decay or by physical annihilation. I do not hesitate to admit that I would do anything, absolutely ANYTHING, to ensure the survival and happiness of our White, Western People [...] I mean to WIN. I am a political soldier, not a preacher. Perhaps I will go to hell for doing what must be done. But from down there, I will be able to look up and see the sweet little White boys and girls once again playing in a White, Christian, decent, safe and wholesome America. And if I can do that, then bring on the devil with his worst."

"White Man, let us stand together to secure the survival of your people and my people, for they are one and the same - they are our beloved, miraculous, wonderful, blessed and masterful white race!"