Wallace Quotes

“On a bright winter morning in 1966, seizing another cigarette from the pack on her metal desk and igniting it with a quick snap of her lighter, she mused, “Of course, somebody's gonna get George sooner or later. I've accepted that. He's gonna get it. My only consolation is, when it happens, he'll be doing the only thing he's ever cared about doing anyway.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“If young George felt closer to his grandfather than to his own father, it was probably because George Wallace, Sr., was almost totally absorbed in a ceaseless, savage, losing cat-fight with life.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“Toward the close of the campaign, a day was spent in the state's largest city, Birmingham. It is, in Alabama, the closest thing to alien turf for Wallace, not only because of its relative sophistication, but because the Republican party is particularly robust there.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“In fact, what makes Wallace the ultimate demagogue is that, behind his indefatigable scrambling, his ferocious concentration, his inexhaustible ambition, there seems to lurk a secret, desperate suspicion that facing him, aside from and beyond his political existence, is nothingness- an empty, terrible white blank. It's as if, when the time finally arrives for him to cease to be a politician, he will simply cease to be.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“In Alabama Wallace has managed to pass the point of being just the most popular politician in the memory of the state. He has become a Folk Hero. Alabama, along with the rest of the South, has been changing into something more like the rest of the nation, and in the process, a particular devastation is being worked among its people. In his transition from the gentle earth to the city-the filling stations, the power lines, the merciless asphalt, the neon Jumboburger drive-ins-the Southern yeoman has acquired a quality of metallic ferocity.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“At a patio party recently in New Orleans' French Quarter, an oil millionaire from Dallas allowed, “I'd vote for him in a minute, and give him all the money I could, if I just felt I could trust him-if he wouldn't wind up getting tamed by Washington like Lester Maddox over there in Georgia. I'm a Republican, but I'd love to support him, and every one of my friends-oilmen, fellows in wheat-feel the same way.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“In this time, if there is an ominous conspiracy underway in the United States, it would be the silent massive suspicion of a conspiracy which threatens home, job, status, the accustomed order of life.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“Hell, we got too much dignity in government now, what we need is some meanness.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“Let 'em call me a racist. It don't make any difference. Whole heap of folks in this country feel the same way I do. Race is what's gonna win this thing for me.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace

“bellowing with a crack in his voice, “Get out of here! Get out of here! You are an outrage!” That berserk charge-anarchic and hopeless, an abandonment of fairness, proprieties, all civilized approaches, a retreat to simple brute action-testified not only to despair and fury over the fact that this man could be speaking there at all, but to a sinking of the heart over the absurdly serious import of that figure's audacious aspirations, a dread that something sinister and implacable was afoot in the land. As he was hustled offstage during the short melee, he glanced quickly back over his shoulder at the furor with a curious, bemused, almost awed expression.”
― Marshall Frady, Wallace: The Classic Portrait of Alabama Governor George Wallace