Talk:Huey Long

Fascism and flag

• "If fascism ever comes to America, it will come wrapped in an American flag." **This quote has been falsely attributed to Sinclair Lewis as well as Huey Long. There are similar quotes available from his material from his published novel "It Can't Happen Here." There is an unsubstantiated rumor that one of the characters was based on Huey Long. Hence, these are false attributions.

• Long also supposedly similarly stated: "When Fascism comes to America, it will be called anti-Fascism!" However, this quote is also falsely attributed to Huey Long. There is no evidence to support the claim that Long ever said this.

My voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it. Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done.” — Huey Long, on the floor of the U.S. Senate, March 5 1935

Unsourced

• "Someday Louisiana's gonna get good government and they're not gonna like it."

• "People say I steal. Well, all politicians steal. I steal. But a lot of what I stole has spilled over in no-toll bridges, hospitals . . . and to build this university."
  • Speech at Louisiana State University

• "There is no rule so sure as that one that the same mill that grinds out fortunes above a certain size at the top, grinds out paupers at the bottom."
  • Speech in U.S. Senate April 4, 1932

• "The only difference I ever found between the Democratic leadership and the Republican leadership is that one of them is skinning you from the ankle up and the other, from the ear down."

• "Hard work is damn near as overrated as monogamy."

• “I can frighten or buy ninety-nine out of every one hundred men.”

• "Sure I carry a gun. Sometimes I carry four. Can't tell when somebody's going to shoot the King."

• "I would describe a demagogue as a politician who don't keep his promises. On that basis, I'm the first man to have power in Louisiana who ain't a demagogue. I kept every promise I ever made to the people of Louisiana. None of these exes and belly-achers that have been fighting me down there ever kept his promises when he was in office. It was an unheard of thing in Louisiana until Huey P. Long got in."

• “Goddamn you Oscar, don’t you stall around with me! I can break you as easily as I made you!”
  • To Governor Oscar K. Allen

• “I’m for the poor man – all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance.”

• “Don’t say I’m working for niggers. I’m not … ‘Every Man a King’ means every man, niggers along with the rest, but not especially for niggers.”

• “There is no dictatorship in Louisiana. There is a perfect democracy there, and when you have a perfect democracy it is pretty hard to tell it from a dictatorship.”

• “I would prefer to vote this billion dollars to feed the starving rather than for more battleships to kill somebody.”
  • After rejecting a naval appropriations bill in the Senate

• “Not a single thin dime of concentrated, bloated, pompous wealth, massed in the hands of a few people, has been raked down to relieve the masses.”
  • Criticizing the limitations of Roosevelt’s New Deal

• "Don't liken me to that sonofabitch. Anybody that lets his public policies be mixed up with religious prejudice is a plain God-damned fool!"
  • Response when asked if he saw any resemblance between himself and Adolf Hitler

• Long often compared the Democratic and Republican parties to “High Popalorum and Low Popahirum,”
  • Two patent medicines with different labels but identical ingredients.

• "God, don't let me die. I have so much left to do."
  • His last words, reportedly

• I'm a dyed-in-the-wool party man. I don't know just what party I am in right now, but I am for the party.
  • in Hardball by Chris Matthews