George Wallace

George Corley Wallace Jr. (25 August 1919 - 13 September 1998), was a United States politician who was elected Governor of Alabama as a Democrat four times (1962, 1970, 1974 and 1982) and ran for U.S. President four times. During the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, he rose to fame as a symbol of racial bigotry.

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• We shall continue to maintain segregation in Alabama completely and absolutely without violence or ill-will. ... I advocate hatred of no man, because hate will only compound the problems facing the South. ... We ask for patience and tolerance and make an earnest request that we be allowed to handle state and local affairs without outside interference.
  • First gubernatorial campaign (14 February 1958)

• I want to tell the good people of this state as a judge of the 3rd Judicial Circuit, if I didn’t have what it took to treat a man fair regardless of his color, then I don’t have what it takes to be the governor of your great state.
  • First gubernatorial campaign (1958)

• I was outsegged (segregated) by John Patterson. And I’ll tell you here and now, I will never be outsegged again.
  • To Seymore Trammell (1958)

• As your governor, I shall resist any illegal federal court order, even to the point of standing at the schoolhouse door in person, if necessary.
  • Campaign speech on federally mandated integration (1962)

• It is very appropriate that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us time and again down through history. Let us rise to the call for freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
  • First Inaugural Speech as Governor of Alabama, (January 1963)

• The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the central government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this state by officers of the federal government.
  • At the University of Alabama-Tuscaloosa, during his stand to bar integration (1963)

• Sure, I look like a white man. But my heart is as black as anyone's here.
  • Speech to a mostly African-American audience, as quoted in 1001 Dumbest Things Ever Said (2004) by Steven D. Price, p. 33

• Why does the Air Force need expensive new bombers? Have the people we've been bombing over the years been complaining?
  • Absurdities, Scandals & Stupidities in Politics (2006) by Hakeem Shittu and Callie Query, p. 106

Attributed

• I tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have been part of my career, and nobody listened. And then I began talking about niggers, and they stomped the floor.

Unsourced

• Being governor don't mean a thing anymore in this country. We're nothing. Just high-paid ornaments is all. I'm thinking of running for president myself.

• If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car, it'll be the last car he'll ever lay down in front of.

• I've read about foreign policy and studied — I know the number of continents.

• I've seen many politicians paralyzed in the legs as myself, but I've seen more of them who were paralyzed in the head.

• The doves in this country and some of the media are the cause of fifty-some-odd-thousand Americans being killed and all that money being spent, and all that inflation.

• There's some people who've gone over the state and said, "Well, George Wallace has talked too strong about segregation." Now let me ask you this: how in the name of common sense can you be too strong about it? You're either for it or you're against it. There's not any middle ground as I know of. (1959)