JOSEPH CANNON

In the last analysis sound judgment will prevail.

In our anxiety to get votes, we sometimes put in our platform things that are not orthodox.

The country don’t need no legislation

The Post Office Department is like a great root spreading many feet underground and nourishing the mighty oak. It is the tap root of civilization.

The President [Theodore Roosevelt] has as much use for the Constitution as a tom cat has for a marriage license.

A majority can do anything.

I am goddamned tired of listening to all this babble for reform. America is a hell of a success. Why tinker with it? The country don't need any legislation.

Whence comes this demand for tariff tinkering. Aren't all our fellows happy?

Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to let the skunks choose the weapons.

I am one of the great army of mediocrity which constitutes the majority.

If illiterate immigrants had been excluded from the United States in the past, my ancestors would have been rejected.

Nearly all legislation is the result of compromise.

Never attempt to buy the favor of your enemies at the expense of your friends.

I am not here as having one vote in the national legislature to shut the door in the face of any of the Caucasian race that are willing to come, whether they be educated or uneducated, and under the hand of honest, earned bread, the common [i.e. public] schools will take care of the children.

The pendulum will swing back.

When Congress consents to the Executive making the budget it will have surrendered the most important part of a representative government.

He kept his ear so close to the ground that it was full of grasshoppers.

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.

I will not vote for any law which will make fair for me and foul for another.

The trouble with [President William Howard] Taft is that if he were Pope he would think it necessary to appoint a few Protestant cardinals.

I have never been in harmony with the proposition to apply the educational test [to immigrants]. If that test had been applied two hundred years ago I have ancestors who never would have gotten in.

... be it said to the honor of the Hebrew race [the Jews], we very rarely find one in the poor house, they are willing to work, and they add so much to the progress of the country.

No matter how great an improvement the new tariff may be, it almost always results in the party in power losing the election.

If anybody ever finds out where your district is, they'll beat you.

I suppose we'll have to pass this damned bill!