George F. Hoar

Our people, so far as they are of English descent, learned from their fathers the stories of Catholic persecution and of the fires of Smithfield.

Human nature, certainly American human nature, will never, in my opinion, long hold out against that method of dealing.

If any man try to deprive you of your absolute right, begin to defend yourself by giving him his own.

But I have believed that the way to encounter bigotry is by liberality.

I have always resisted it and denounced it to the utmost of my power.

But religious prejudice against the Catholics has been its chief inspiration.

That is the bitter and almost superstitious dread of the Catholics, which has resulted more than once in riots and crimes, and more than once in the attempt to exclude them from political power in the country.

One very unreasonable, yet very natural excitement has stirred deeply the American people on several occasions in our history.

I thought it might, perhaps, strike the Legislature of Massachusetts and the public more impressively than a sober argument.

Will you please to make another that no one shall wear our feathers, so that no one will kill us to get them?

Even the nightingales are being all killed in Italy.

If this goes on much longer, all your song-birds will be gone.

People with guns and snares lie in wait to kill us, as if the place for a bird were not in the sky, alive, but in a shop window or under a glass case.

Even pretty and sweet girls, who we should think would be our best friends, kill our brothers and children so that they may wear plumage on their hats.

They kill us because our feathers are beautiful.

So the ornament on the horrible woman's head had cost the lives of eleven of these beautiful birds and very likely in every case the lives of a brood of young ones.

Many varieties of songbirds which were familiar to my own boyhood were unknown to my children.

Be assured, my benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when the week begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimore and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might pull at my trousers legs and thrust themselves…

I am myself but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation, and there is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasy and a dim glimpse of that beatific vision.

You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanians can never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls and eaten on a Sunday morning by a person whose theology is sound, and who believes in all the five points of…

The men who possess the capacity for coarse wit and rough repartee, and who indulge it, seldom get very far in public favor.

When they come to take serious action, they prefer to get their inspiration from the church or the college and not from the circus.

But it will be a great mistake to think that the American people do not estimate such things at their true value.

We are apt to think that grave and serious reasonings are lost on the audiences that receive them, half asleep, as if listening to a tedious sermon, and who come to life again when the stump speaker takes the platform.

We often witness and perhaps are tempted to envy the applause which many public speakers get by buffoonery, by rough wit, by coarse personality, by appeal to the vulgar passions.