Quotes about Henry Clay

Abraham Lincoln

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

Andrew Jackson

[Referring to Henry Clay:] Judas of the West

Clay came from the western part of Kentucky—then the "western" part of the United States.

Zachary Taylor

I have never yet exercised the privilege of voting, but had I been called upon at the last presidential election to do so, I should most certainly have cast my vote for Mr. Clay.

Democratic Party

May the hickory ramrods ram down the powder of equality into our national guns, and wadded well with the voices of the people to blow Clay in the mud.

The “hickory ramrod” referred to Andrew Jackson (Old Hickory). Henry Clay was his Whig Opponent.

Abraham Lincoln

I have always been an old-line Henry Clay Whig.

Rebecca Harding Davis

The only hero known to my childhood was Henry Clay.

Rand Paul

As long as I sit at Henry Clay's desk, I will remember his lifelong desire to forge agreement, but I will also keep close to my heart the principled stand of his cousin, Cassius Clay, who refused to forsake the life of any human, simply to find agreement.

New York Herald

Of all the leaders of the old parties, of all aspiring spirits of the new ones, including General Taylor and the whole of his cabinet, from head to tail, not a single soul, not a single mind, has dared to exhibit the moral courage of coming out with any plan for settling the whole question, except it is Henry Clay, who, solitary and alone, faces the crises with as much calmness and composure as General Taylor did the Mexicans at Buena Vista. Whatever may be the objections to Mr. Clay’s plan on the one side, or its recommendations on the other, we think the moral courage he has exhibited is a spectacle of sublimity that ought to shame all the politicians at Washington, and the miserable drivellers of both parties, and all parties, there and elsewhere.

We could change the name of the President to any of the last 4 and change the issue to entitlements, and this would appear to be a modern editorial criticizing politicians of both parties for a lack of courage and failure to face significant critical issues. Henry Clay tried to forge a political compromise, but he was alone among the politicians for even dealing with the issue. The photo is of the Taylor Cabinet, none of whom offered any leadership on the slavery issue that was tearing the country apart,

Andrew Jackson

I trust in due time to lay the perfidy, meanness, and wickedness of [Henry] Clay naked before the American people. I have lately got an intimation of some of his secret movements, which, if I can reach with positive and responsible proof, I will wield to his political, and perhaps his actual, destruction.

Deborah Tannen

Back when the powerful 19th-century senator Henry Clay was called 'the great compromiser,' achieving a compromise really was considered great.

William Monroe Trotter

the great compromiser the traitor within

He was one of the Black intellectuals who criticized the white’s favorite Negro Leader, Booker T. Washington who concentrated his efforts on Black education and self-improvement to make Blacks more acceptable to whites. Trotter was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key from Harvard University. He was an outspoken critic of President Woodrow Wilson’s policy that for the first time instituted official segregation of Federal Employment and his firing of all Blacks then in executive or white collar positions in the Federal Government. Wilson, for all his supposed modernity, was one of the most racist of all American Presidents. Washington thought that segregation was so entrenched that it would take many generations to eliminate it, and therefore felt that the best thing to do was to improve the positions of Blacks within the segregationist structure. Both sides were right from different perspectives although Trotter, Dubois and their followers did much more to confront and eventually change racist America.

Randall Jarrell

There are some good things and some fantastic ones in Auden's early attitude; if the reader calls it a muddle I shall acquiesce, with the remark that the later position might be considered a more rarefied muddle. But poets rather specialize in muddles and I have no doubt which of the muddles was better for Auden's poetry: one was fertile and usable, the other decidedly is not. Auden sometimes seems to be saying with Henry Clay, "I had rather be right than poetry"; but I am not sure, then, that he is either.

Henry Clay Quotes