George Smathers Quotes

1st Baron Verulam

This famous quotation illustrates the perfect political reply to a personal attack. In one short sentence, Lincoln denied the charge, obtained the sympathy of the audience, demonstrated that he was not stuck-up, entertained the crowd, and gave everyone there a story to tell about him afterward—the perfect oratorical response.

Writing about President George Washington:. Bache, a grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was jailed under the Sedition Act for his writings against the government.

At that time, most of the leading Republicans practiced negative campaigning with vicious personal attacks that were often untrue. He was the only one of the 9 candidates who did not engage in the technique. He came in close to last.

This is one of the great political putdowns in history. He in effect called Dundas a liar without ever being overt or nasty.

The Grammar Curmudgeon

There were many national politicians who would publicly castigate homosexuals and yet were themselves gay and in effect were living two lives. For them “coming out of the closet” had a temporary meaning restricted to time and place and then they would go back “in the closet” for their public personae.

This quotation pithily summarizes a common problem in politics of describing budgets. In most years there has been a national inflation. If a new budget is, in actual dollars, the same as the previous years or a little more, but the increase is less than the inflation level, the agency will not be able to provide the same level of services as the previous year. Therefore services will be cut and those who are politically in favor of more money for the program legitimately describe this as a “budget cut”. Opponents of larger funding increases, also legitimately describe the funding as a “budget increase”. One side refers to what the money can buy and the other, to the absolute dollars spent. This is an example of the classical ambiguity of political oratory.

Adams liked hardly anyone. Hamilton was a fellow Federalist leader. Adams even had harsh words for George Washington. See {621581}

Naples was an independent kingdom before the unification of Italy. This quotation illustrates one of the lowest periods of the Roman Catholic Church where the personal morality of the Pope and Cardinals was greatly at odds with the earlier and current positions of the Church. This hypocrisy, nepotism, and corruption was one of the major factors that led to the Reformation. Note that the Pope had an illegitimate son who he named a Cardinal and the Pope wanted his son to marry the daughter of the king. The king was not enthusiastic given the son’s status as a Cardinal of the Church.

Roosevelt’s first gubernatorial term was shaken by the Stock Market Crash and the Failure of the Banks 1929 and the passivity of the Herbert Hoover administration in Washington in coping with the economy and the Great Depression. Reform of Tammany Hall and other State problems took a back seat to trying to create jobs and stabilize the state economy. The Republican candidate Tuttle could not argue against FDR’s economic policies as he would then have to defend President Hoover who was becoming exceedingly unpopular. So he went after the corruption of the Tammany Hall Machine and Roosevelt’s relative passivity. The voters were ok with FDR’s priorities.