Bryant H. McGill Quotes
The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.
McGill, Bryant. Voice of Reason. McGill Media, 2012.
Ingersoll was considered to be the greatest orator and political thinker of his day, but his overt atheistic views curtailed his elected political career.
What is fascinating about this quotation is that although the head of a religion, Smith was not advocating the kinds of personal lifestyles of his church the way modern religious leaders do, but was concerned with the much larger issues of expansionism, corruption of the courts and judiciary, and land distribution. He was a classic reform candidate in that sense. Smith had written to most of the then likely Presidential candidates of both major parties asking for their position on the Mormons who were facing persecution wherever they went. None of the politicians would make any satisfactory commitments. Smith took Direct Action and became the only major religious official to have run for the Presidency of the United States until Pat Robertson tried and failed in 2000. Smith’s assassination shortly thereafter cut his run for the Presidency short before it made much headway and politically he had no chance to affect the race.
This quotation so impressed Thomas Jefferson that he wrote it in his Commonplace Book.
