Thomas Ustick Walter Quotes

Kennel of filth

Disease among the working classes is caused by atmospheric impurities produced by decomposing animal and vegetable substances, by damp and filth, and close and overcrowded dwellings.

A dark house is always an unhealthy house, always an ill-aired house, always a dirty house. Want of light stops growth and promotes scrofula, rickets, etc., among the children. People lose their health in a dark house, and if they get ill, they cannot get well again in it.

Holloway Prison is a very old place, and it has the disadvantages of old places which have never known enough air and sunshine. It reeks with the odours of generations of bad ventilation, and it contrives to be at once the stuffiest and the draughtiest building I have ever been in.

Rome is the most dreadful cesspit … the great sewer of Tarquin itself would have been incapable of dealing with such a mass of filth.

The Secretary of State exists only to recognize the existence of a world which Congress would rather ignore ... Since the first day the Senate existed, it has always intrigued against the Secretary of State ...

In all the world there is not, perhaps, now concentrated in any single spot so much swindling and villainy, so much foul disease, such a hideous dung-heap of moral and physical abomination as in the scene of this far-famed undertaking of nineteenth-century engineering

The time was when your Representatives in Congress were neither offered, nor would they endure reproach in your behalf. But for many years past, they have heard you in Congress habitually reviled by the most opprobrious epithets on account of the institution of slavery. If their spirits are yet unbroken, they must be chilled by a sense of humiliation at the insults they daily receive as your representatives. You are arraigned as criminals. Slavery is dragged into every debate, and Congress has become little else, than a grand instrument in the hands of abolitionists to degrade and ruin the South.

There's basically filth everywhere, and there's no way to escape it.

Home, home -- a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by a rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease, and smells.

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the President of the United States shall be, and he is hereby authorized and requested, to cause a survey to be taken of the coasts of the United States, in which shall be designated the islands and shoals, with the roads or places of anchorage, within twenty leagues of any part of the shores of the United States

The filibuster is the most important check on raw Presidential power.

The House Republicans are not the enemy, they’re the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.

I will not compromise with my conscience. I will cast my vote to protect the liberties of our people.

You start as far to the right as you can get, and go to the Conference Committee with the Senate, and hopefully end up with something you can live with.

I can't vote my own convictions on civil rights. If I did, I wouldn't be returned to the Senate. It's as simple as that.

When President Johnson was Majority Leader he ran things the way he wanted them. Now I am Majority Leader and will run things the way I want them

I would listen with growing outrage as hypocritical and obtuse American Senators made all these demands of Iraqi legislators and yet themselves could not even pass budgets.

My personal opinion is that a referendum is not necessary to sense public opinion or get a non-partisan consideration of this question. It cannot relieve the President and the Senate of their constitutional powers and duties in respect to foreign relations. I believe the American people prefer to express their will through the representatives selected by them, and in accordance with our long-established constitutional methods.

A millionaire can buy a Senate seat just as he would buy an opera box or a yacht or any other luxury in which he can afford to indulge himself. In some instances the sale takes the form of open bribery of the legislators; more often the Senate seat was simply the satisfaction of a ‘claim’ acknowledged by the leaders of the party and created by large contributions to the party treasury.

Why should a man have a better right to kill his neighbor with a house than with an axe in the street?

It is … not unconstitutional for the House of Representatives to refuse to fund the government, or for the Senate to deny confirmation to all presidential nominees. But since only the House can originate money bills, and only the Senate can confirm nominees, the system cannot tolerate such intransigence for long.

I want to thank the 32 Senators who said that they would vote for me and the 27 who did.

The history of Congress shows that once parliamentary tools become big enough obstacles for the majority party, they are abolished or reformed.