Scorn

by Parris, Matthew;

Abraham Lincoln to General McClellan, accused of inactivity in the American Civil War

  Filthy Story-Teller, Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, Usurper, Monster, Ignoramus Abe, Old Scoundrel, Perjurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Field-Butcher, Land-Pirate.

  Harper’s Weekly on Abraham Lincoln

  God damn you god damn old hellfiered god damned soul to hell god damn you and god damn your god damned family’s god damned hellfiered god damned soul to hell and good damnation god damn them and god damn your god damned friends to hell.

  Peter Muggins, American citizen, in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln

  He is not known except as a slang-whanging stump-speaker of which all parties are ashamed.

  The Albany Atlas and Argus on the Gettysburg Address, 1863

  A horrid looking wretch he is, sooty and scoundrelly in aspect, a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse swapper, and the night man, a creature fit evidently for petty treason, small stratagems and all sorts of spoils.

  Charleston Mercury on Lincoln 1863

  Lincoln is the leanest, lankest, most ungainly mass of legs and arms and hatchet face ever strung on a single frame. He has most unwarrantably abused the privilege, which all politicians have, of being ugly.

  Houston Telegraph on Lincoln, 1863

  … the small intellect, growing smaller … [the Republicans] take up a fourth-rate lecturer who cannot speak good grammar and who … delivers hackneyed, illiterate compositions.

  New York Herald on Lincoln, 1860 election

  Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn’t be easy to reproduce.

  The Times on President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, 1863

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

  Abraham Lincoln on Stephen A. Douglas

  Deformed Sir, The Ugly Club in full meeting have elected you an honorary member of the Hood-Favored Fraternity. Prince Harry was lean, Falstaff was fat. Thersites was hunchbacked, and Slowkenlengus was renowned for the eminent miscalculation which Nature had made in the length of the nose; but it remained for you to unite all species of deformity and stand forth as The Prince of Ugly Fellows.

  Anonymous letter to Abraham Lincoln

  If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?

  Abraham Lincoln

  His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly, a prisoner in their midst, until it died of servitude and overwork.

  Senator William McAdoo on Warren Harding, US President

  He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

  H.L. Mencken on Warren Harding

  The only man, woman or child who wrote a simple declarative sentence with seven grammatical errors is dead.

  E.E. Cummings on hearing of Warren Harding’s death

  He had a bungalow mind.

  Woodrow Wilson on Warren G. Harding, his successor as President

  He’s thin, boys. He’s thin as piss on a hot rock.

  Senator William E. Jenner on W. Averell Harriman, Governor of New York

  A Byzantine logothete.

  Theodore Roosevelt on Woodrow Wilson

  A taste for charming and cultivated friends and a tendency to bathe frequently causes in them the deepest suspicion.

  Theodore Roosevelt on members of the ‘Free Silver’ populist movement

  Thomas E. Dewey is just about the nastiest little man I’ve ever known. He struts sitting down.

  Mrs Clarence Dykstra

  How can they tell?

  Dorothy Parker on being told that Calvin Coolidge was dead

  Democracy is that system of government under which the people, having 35,717,342 native-born adult whites to choose from, including thousands who are handsome and many of whom are wise, pick out a Coolidge to be head of state.

  H.L. Mencken on Calvin Coolidge

  Hoover, if elected, will do one thing that is almost incomprehensible to the human mind: he will make a great man out of Coolidge.

  Clarence Darrow during the 1928 American presidential campaign

  His attachment to those of his friends whom he could make useful to himself was thoroughgoing and exemplary.

  John Quincy Adams on Thomas Jefferson

  That dark designing sordid ambitious vain proud arrogant and vindictive knave.

  General Charles Lee on George Washington

  Not worth a pitcherful of warm piss.

  John Nance Garner, FDR’s vice-president, on the importance of his position. The quote is often amended to ‘warm spit’ and often misattributed.

  All the president is is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to get them to do what they are supposed to do anyway.

  Harry S. Truman

  He’ll sit right here and he’ll say do this, do that! And nothing will happen! Poor Ike – it won’t be a bit like the Army.

  Harry S. Truman on Dwight D. Eisenhower

  As an intellectual he bestowed upon the games of golf and bridge all the enthusiasm and perseverance that he withheld from books and ideas.

  Emmet John Hughes on Dwight D. Eisenhower

  An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

  Dwight D. Eisenhower

  I guess it proves that in America anyone can be President.

  Gerald Ford on his appointment

  When his library burned down it destroyed both books. Dole hadn’t finished colouring in the second.

  Jack Kemp on Bob Dole

  When he was a quarterback he played without a helmet.

  Dole on Kemp

  Bob says he offers real leadership – he’s right, backwards not forwards.

  Kemp on Dole

  The candidate of pain, austerity and sacrifice.

  Kemp on Dole

  It is the greatest honour of my life to have been asked to run by the greatest American hero.

  Kemp, accepting Dole’s invitation to be his vice-presidential running-mate

  You don’t want to get in a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.

  Bob Dole

  Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not.

  Charles Percy, US Senator

  Mothers all want their sons to grow up to be President but they don’t want them to become politicians in the process.

  John F. Kennedy

  The enviably attractive nephew who sings an Irish ballad for the company and then winsomely disappears before the table-clearing and dishwashing begin.

  Lyndon B. Johnson on John F. Kennedy

  Lyndon acts like there was never going to be a tomorrow.

  Lady Bird Johnson on her husband

  Johnson’s instinct for power is as primordial as a salmon’s going upstream to spawn.

  Theodore H. White

  I’d much rather have that fellow inside my tent pissing out than outside my tent pissing in.

  Lyndon B. Johnson, explaining why he retained J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI

  Trust him as much as you would trust a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle.

  Dean Acheson on J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI

  The most notorious liar in America.

  J. Edgar Hoover on Martin Luther King

  Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree and then mount the stump to make a speech for conservation.

  Adlai Stevenson on Richard
Nixon. Attrib.

  Richard Nixon is a no-good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

  Harry S. Truman

  Richard Nixon was an evil man – evil in a way that only those who believe in the physical reality of the Devil can understand it. He was utterly without ethics or morals or any bedrock sense of decency. Nobody trusted him – except maybe the Stalinist Chinese, and honest historians will remember him mainly as a rat who kept scrambling to get back on the ship.

  Hunter S. Thompson on Richard Nixon

  Richard Nixon is a pubic hair in the teeth of America.

  Graffiti on Richard Nixon

  The Republicans are a party that says government doesn’t work – and then get elected and prove it.

  P.J. O’Rourke

  Gerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.

  Lyndon B. Johnson on Gerald Ford (often misquoted)

  He’s so dumb he couldn’t tip shit out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.

  Lyndon Johnson on Gerald Ford

  He looks like the guy in a science fiction movie who is the first to see the Creature.

  David Frye on Gerald Ford

  I love all my children, but some of them I don’t like.

  Lillian Carter, mother of Jimmy Carter

  A triumph of the embalmer’s art.

  Gore Vidal on Ronald Reagan

  He doesn’t make snap decisions but he doesn’t overthink either.

  Nancy Reagan on her husband

  If the President’s penis is straight, it is the only thing about his administration that is.

  Mark Steyn on rumours of an intimate nature concerning Bill Clinton

  He is the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral he attends.

  Todd Purdum on Bill Clinton, post-presidency

  I have difficulty in looking humble for extended periods of time.

  Henry Kissinger

  I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

  Henry Kissinger

  Satire died the day they gave Henry Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize. There were no jokes left after that.

  Tom Lehrer

  A joke that doesn’t make you laugh about someone you don’t know told by a man who went to Oxford.

  AA Gill on satire

  I think I speak for everyone when I say what a shame it is that only one of these guys can lose.

  David Letterman on the 2000 Presidential election campaign between George

  W. Bush and Al Gore

  I am Al Gore and I used to be the next President of the United States.

  Al Gore, to an audience of students

  Al Gore is an old person’s idea of what a young person should be.

  Michael Kinsey

  The start of spring, otherwise known to Al Gore as proof of global warming.

  Bill Clinton

  He struggles to exude authority. He furrows his brow, trying to look more sagacious, but he ends up looking as if he has indigestion. Appearing confused at his own speech, he seems like a first-grade actor in a production of James and the Giant Peach. Are his blinks Morse code for ‘Oh, man, don’t let that teleprompter break’?

  Maureen Dowd of George W. Bush

  That’s like saying the veterinarian and the taxidermist are in the same business because either way you get your dog back.

  Joseph Lieberman on the suggestion that he shared many of the views of George

  W. Bush

  George Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he fucking applied himself.

  Margaret Cho

  George Bush doesn’t care about black people.

  Kanye West, going off script at a Hurricane Katrina benefit concert

  The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple – talk about class and hope no one notices.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Candidates without ideas hiring consultants without convictions to run campaigns without content.

  President Gerald Ford talking about a US Presidential race

  Too few have the courage of my convictions.

  Robert M. Hutchins (Margaret Thatcher made a similar remark about her Cabinet)

  Cheer up, only one of them can win.

  Bumper sticker in the US Election 1992

  She’s every American’s ex-wife.

  P.J. O’Rourke on Hillary Clinton

  A congenital liar.

  William Safire on Hillary Clinton

  If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.

  Hillary Rodham Clinton

  A goddamned fool he was on television talking about mortgages, and it was quite clear he didn’t know what a mortgage is. His head rattles as he walks.

  Gore Vidal on John McCain

  I think her strategy is more or less insane … I’d always rather liked her. She’s a perfectly able lawyer … But this long campaign, this daily search for the grail, has driven her crazy.

  Gore Vidal on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination

  It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training.

  Christopher Hitchens on Barack Obama’s campaign slogan of ‘Yes we can’

  They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.

  Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House of Representatives on members of Congress

  Arianna Huffington is unattractive, both inside and out. I fully understand why her former husband left her for a man – he made a good decision.

  Donald Trump

  You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.

  Donald Trump

  One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace. Good people don’t go into government.

  Donald Trump

  When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.

  Donald Trump

  Mr Trump is a misogynist, a racist and a xenophobe. He glories in his own ignorance and inconsistency. Truth is whatever he finds convenient. His policy ideas are ludicrous, where they are not horrifying. Yet his attitudes and ideas are less disturbing than his character: he is a narcissist, bully and spreader of conspiracy theories. It is frightening to consider how such a man would use the powers at the disposal of the president.

  Martin Wolf in the Financial Times

  We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  Euan Ferguson’s suggested campaign slogan for Donald Trump

  Faced with the prospect of voting for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, Mary Anne Noland of Richmond chose, instead to pass into the eternal love of God on Sunday, May 15 2016, at the age of 68.

  Obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch

  On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned with a moron.

  H.L. Mencken

  No one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than the Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to the issues that matter, like: did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell? And where are Biggie and Tupac?

  Barack Obama on producing his certificate, whose authenticity Donald Trump had publicly called into doubt

  Facts,
evidence, reason, logic, an understanding of science – these are good things. These are qualities you want in people making policy … In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about. That’s not keeping it real, or telling it like it is. That’s not challenging political correctness. That’s just not knowing what you’re talking about.

  Barack Obama

  Scratch any American and underneath you’ll find an isolationist.

  Dean Rusk

  A few decades ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no cash, no hope and no jobs. Please don’t let Kevin Bacon die.

  Bill Murray

  Politics in Europe and Beyond

  I wonder what he meant by that.

  Prince Metternich on the death of scheming statesman Talleyrand

  This going into Europe will not turn out to be the thrilling mutual exchange supposed. It is more like nine middle-aged couples with failing marriages meeting in a darkened bedroom in a Brussels hotel for a Group Grope.

  E.P. Thompson on the EEC, in the Sunday Times, 1975

  Up Yours Delors!

  Sun headline, attacking the President of the European Commission, Jaques Delors

  I was my best successor but I decided not to succeed myself.

  Pierre Trudeau on his decision not to seek another term as Canadian Prime Minister

  A political leader worthy of assassination.

  Irving Layton on Pierre Trudeau

  A man who looks as if he has two flies fucking in his mouth.

  Boris Yeltsin on his adviser Sergei Filatov

  He has missed a wonderful opportunity to keep his mouth shut.

  Jacques Chirac on Ariel Sharon

  Israel’s dark id.

  Tony Judt on Ariel Sharon

  I understand why he has to do this – to prove he’s a man. He’s afraid of his own weakness. Russia has nothing, no successful politics or economy. All they have is this.

  Angela Merkel, after Vladimir Putin brought a dog to a press conference, knowing she had a fear of them

  An unfuckable lard-arse.

  Silvio Berlusconi on Angela Merkel

  What is his name? It’s someone with a tan. Barack Obama!

  Silvio Berlusconi

  Better to like women than to be gay.

  Silvio Berlusconi

  In twenty years of politics, I have never insulted anyone.

  Silvio Berlusconi

  You won the elections, but I won the count.