Douglas Quotes

His [Stephen Douglas] argument is as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.

Poor, desperate creature; he wants an audience … the people won’t turn out to hear him.

We care not a fig for Whig or Democrat: they are both alike to us; but we shall go for our friends, our TRIED FRIENDS … DOUGLAS is a Master Spirit, and his friends are our friends—we are willing to cast our banners on the air, and fight by his side in the cause of humanity, and equal rights—the cause of liberty and the law

An impeachable offense is whatever the majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.

Stephen A.Douglas was a risk-taker by temperament; I expect that Lincoln - Douglas debates represented another risk he just couldn't resist. He lived to regret it.

At the [U. S.] House [of Representatives], Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, the author of the majority report from the Committee of Elections, had taken the floor last evening, and now raved out his hour in abusive invective upon the members who had pointed out its slanders, and upon the Whig party. His face was convulsed, his gesticulations frantic, and he lashed himself into such a heat that if his body had been made of combustible matter it would have burnt out. In the midst of his roaring, to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat, and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist. And this man comes from a judicial bench, and passes for an eloquent orator!

If you have ever studied geometry, you remember that by a course of reasoning Euclid proves that all the angles in a triangle are equal to two right angles. Euclid has shown you how to work it out. Now, if you undertake to disprove that proposition, and to show that it is erroneous, would you prove it to be false by calling Euclid a liar?

All the anxious politicians of his party have been looking upon him as certainty, at no distant day, to be the President of the United States. They have seen in his round, jolly, fruitful face, post offices land offices, marshalships, and cabinet appointments, chargeships and foreign missions, bursting and sprouting out in wonderful exuberance ready to be laid hold of by their greedy hands.

The son of a bitch should be impeached.

We cannot have two policies. That is axiomatic.

I made three films with Douglas, two with Charles Boyer.

He [Douglas] would understand it a little better if there were a few oil wells in Cook County .

I can't bear it that Douglas isn't still here.

We have the glorious tidings to proclaim, that Lincoln and Hamlin are our next President and Vice President, by overwhelming majorities. They have carried every Free State this side of the Rocky Mountains, except, perhaps, New Jersey, where the vote is close. Douglas will probably carry "nary one!

…a low and dangerous demagogue.

I will not eat dinner with that man [Richard M. Nixon].

Don’t act on the defensive at all. Don’t refer to your past speeches or positions … hold Douglas up as a traitor and conspirator—a pro-slavery bamboozling demagogue.