Wednesday, September 13, 2006
(7:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Adventures in Bizarre Quotation
In Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), Reinhold Niebuhr quotes a Southern politician protesting against suffrage tests for black voters "on the ground that they would discriminate in favor of the educated Negro against the servile, old-time Negro":Now, sir, the old-time Negro is assassinated by this suffrage plan. This new issue, your reader, your writer, your loafer, your voter, your ginger-cake school graduate, with a diploma of side-whiskers and beaver-hat, pocket pistols, brass knucks [sic] and bicycle, he, sir, is the distinguished citizen whom our statesmen would crown at once with the highest dignities of an ancient and respectable commonwealth.This is second only to the Jew's liver quote for the title of "most bizarre quotation discovered while studying for the 20th Century theology exam."
