Poll Tax Quotes

When I was growing up in rural Alabama, it was impossible for me to register to vote. I didn't become a registered voter until I moved to Tennessee, to Nashville, as a student.

… the Republicans are all about suppressing votes.

Too many people struggled, suffered, and died to make it possible for every American to exercise their right to vote.

Kings of Islam! You should with all your royal determination apply yourself to uprooting and disgracing infidels, polytheists, and men of bad dogmas and bad religions. You should not content yourself merely with levying the poll-tax and the tribute from the infidels and you should not allow infidelity to be preserved in spite of your royal power and authority.

Since the birth of our Nation, no other right has been more important than having the ability to vote. Unfortunately, as history has shown, the denial of this right to minorities is a scar on our system of democracy.

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

Republicans in the South... are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.

The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

I was out of the U.K. as a care-free, fun-loving student for much of Mrs. Thatcher's time in Downing Street, and as I didn't own a television in New York, never read the newspapers, and am old enough to have lived before the Internet, she is a shadowy figure in my memory.

The Republican playbook is voter suppression.

My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.

Margaret Thatcher effected profound change in the society and for that she became very unpopular.

Margaret Thatcher's decision to use Scotland as a testing ground for the poll tax was arguably the most disastrous attempt at fiscal engineering since London slapped the stamp tax on the American colonies in the 1760s.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

Margaret was the best prime minister of my lifetime. Mythology has turned Thatcher into someone regarded either as a goddess by her supporters or an evil witch by her opponents.

First it was the whites, and then their Negro message bearers. And the word was always the same: 'Tell your sons to take their names off the books. Don't show up at the courthouse voting day.'

The marked decrease in the average vote for congressmen in the South, from 1892 to 1902, is due primarily to the limitations upon the suffrage, and that these limitations were intended to eliminate the negro vote.

Voting discrimination still exists. Nobody doubts that.

No British politician has ever been more despised by the British people than Margaret Thatcher.

I fail to understand how you can justify a poll tax on the entire population, yet exclude a significant proportion of that population from programmes that this tax is paying for.

When I ran for governor, I talked about the disenfranchisement of voters. I talked about the history that we've had. We've had a horrible history here in Virginia going back to 1901 - the poll tax, literacy tests, disenfranchisement of felons. We're one of the worst four states in America on allowing people back in with voting rights.

Alabama and other states had a terrible record in terms of depriving people of their right to vote, making it difficult for them to vote, discriminating against people.

I believe there should be political consequences for politicians who commit voter suppression.

We should be forced to give so many exemptions and concessions (inevitably to the benefit of high spending authorities in Inner London) that the flat-rate poll tax would rapidly become a surrogate income tax.

The greatest threat to public confidence in elections in this case is the prospect of enforcing a purposefully discriminatory law, one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters.