The Best Thaddeus Stevens Quotes

Thaddeus: We shall oppose this amendment and any legislation that so affronts natural law insulting to God as to man. Congress must never declare equal those whom God created unequal.
Thaddeus: Slavery is the only insult to the natural law, you fatuous nincompoop.

Asa: Have you lost your very soul, Mr. Stevens? Is there nothing you won't say?
Thaddeus: I'm sorry you're nauseous, Asa. That must be unpleasant. I want the amendment to pass, so that the constitution's first and only mention of slavery is its absolute prohibition. For this amendment, for which I have worked all my life and for which countless colored men and women have fought and died and now hundreds of thousands of soldiers... No, sir, no, it seems there's very nearly nothing I won't say.

Thaddeus: The greatest measure of the Nineteenth Century. Passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America.

Thaddeus: How can I hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands, stinking, the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio? Proof that some men ARE inferior, endowed by their maker with dim wits, impermeable to reason, with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot, red blood! YOU are more reptile than man, George, so low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you!
George: How dare you!
Thaddeus: Yet even YOU, Pendleton - who should have been gibbetted for treason long before today - even worthless, unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law! And so again, sir, and again and again and again, I say, I do not hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law! Nothing more.

Abraham: When the people disagree, bringing them together requires going slow until they're ready to...
Thaddeus: Shit on the people and what they want and what they're ready for. I don't give a goddamn about the people and what they want. This is the face of someone who has fought long and hard for the *good* of the people without caring much for any of 'em. And now I look a lot worse without my wig.

Thaddeus: The people elected me to represent them, to lead them, and I lead. You ought to try it.
Abraham: I admire your zeal, Mr. Stevens, and I have tried to profit from the example of it. But if I'd listened to you, I'd have declared every slave free the minute the first shell struck Fort Sumter. Then the border states would've gone over to the Confederacy, the war would've been lost and the Union along with it, and instead of abolishing slavery, as we hope to do in two weeks, we'd be watching helpless as infants as it spread from the American South into South America.
Thaddeus: Oh, how you have longed to say that to me. You claim you trust them, but you know what the people are. You know that the inner compass that should direct the soul toward justice has ossified in white men and women, North and South, unto utter uselessness through tolerating the evil of slavery. White people cannot bear the thought of sharing this country's infinite abundance with Negroes.
Abraham: A compass, I learned when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps, deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp... what's the use of knowing true north?

Thaddeus: Trust? Gentlemen, you seem to have forgotten that our chosen career is politics.

Thaddeus: Read it to me again, my love.
Lydia: "Proposed..."
Thaddeus: And adopted.
Lydia: Adopted. "An Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Section One: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."
Thaddeus: Section Two...
Lydia: "Congress shall have power to enforce this amendment by appropriate legislation..."

Thaddeus: Lincoln the inveterate dawdler, Lincoln the Southerner, Lincoln the capitulating compromiser, our adversary, and leader of the God forsaken Republican Party, our party... Abraham Lincoln has asked us to work with him to accomplish the death of slavery in America. Retain, even in opposition, your capacity for astonishment.

Thaddeus: A point of order, Mr. Speaker, if you please. When will Mr. Wood conclude his interminable gabble? Some of us breathe oxygen, and we find the mephitic fumes of his oratory a lethal challenge to our pulmonary capabilities!
[laughter and applause from Republicans]

Thaddeus: Nothing surprises you, Asa, therefore nothing about you is surprising. Perhaps that is why your constituents did not re-elect you to the coming term.