Agnew Quotes

Yes, I am a Communist. And I will not take the fifth amendment against self-incrimination, because my political beliefs do not incriminate me, they incriminate the Nixons, Agnews, and Reagans.

What Joe McCarthy had done to try to stir up fear and suspicion in the general public about the Commies in the 1950s, Agnew was effectively trying to replicate a decade and a half later when it came to members of the press.

When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security.

Evidently, he would prefer a different kind of television reporting,” he said of Agnew, “one that would be subservient to whatever political group happens to be in authority at the time. Those who might feel momentary agreement with his remarks should think carefully about whether that kind of television news is what they want.

Agnew was like Nixon's id -- without the burden of much actual knowledge or curiosity or responsibility to the country at large.

The 1968 bugging issue revolved around a Republican initiative to undermine Johnson's Paris peace talks that could have ended the Vietnam War and brought home 500,000 American soldiers then fighting in Indochina. The Nixon-Agnew campaign, however, feared that this 'October Surprise' would catapult Vice President Hubert Humphrey to victory and again deny Nixon the White House.

The university was safe. It was a kind of never-never land where everybody, even the teachers, could be a part of Peter Pan’s band and never grow up. And there would always be a Nixon or an Agnew to play Captain Hook.

Agnew’s is a tale of a thoroughly corrupt occupant of the White House whose crimes are discovered by his own Justice Department and who then clings to high office by using the power and prerogative of that same office to save himself.

It is a rare man or woman who is ever really changed by ascension to high office, or tempered by the solemnity of the oaths they have sworn or by the national duties they have shouldered. And Spiro Agnew was certainly not among that rare breed.

He is all my art to me now," said the painter gravely. "I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world's history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinous was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. It is not merely that I paint from him, draw from him, sketch from him. Of course, I have done all that. But he is much more to me than a model or a sitter. I won't tell you that I am dissatisfied with what I have done of him, or that his beauty is such that art cannot express it. There is nothing that art cannot express, and I know that the work I have done, since I met Dorian Gray, is good work, is the best work of my life. But in some curious way—I wonder will you understand me?—his personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now recreate life in a way that was hidden from me before. 'A dream of form in days of thought'—who is it who says that? I forget; but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad—for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty— his merely visible presence—ah! I wonder can you realize all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body— how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me! You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me, and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for and always missed.

… Why bother with newspapers, if this is all they offer? Agnew was right. The press is a gang of cruel faggots. Journalism is not a profession or a trade. It is a cheap catch-all for fuckoffs and misfits—a false doorway to the backside of life, a filthy piss-ridden little hole nailed off by the building inspector, but just deep enough for a wino to curl up from the sidewalk and masturbate like a chimp in a zoo-cage.

The efforts of Agnew, Nixon, Haldeman, Haig, George Bush, and others—they failed because Beall had an investigation to pursue, and he had independent public servants to protect and stand up for, and he never once blinked.

Just as there are those who accept every UFO report at face value, there are also those who dismiss the idea of alien visitation out of hand and with great passion. It is, they say, unnecessary to examine the evidence, and “unscientific” even to contemplate the issue. I once helped to organize a public debate at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science between proponent and opponent scientists of the proposition that some UFOs were spaceships; whereupon a distinguished physicist, whose judgment in many other matters I respected, threatened to sic the Vice President of the United States on me if I persisted in this madness. (Nevertheless, the debate was held and published, the issues were a little better clarified, and I did not hear from Spiro T. Agnew.)

My take on all these things is pretty simple. It's all on the table, every bit of it, and you should use anything that improves the quality of your wiring and doesn't get in the way of your story. If you like an alliterative phrases-the knights of nowhere battling the nabobs of nullity-by all means throw it in and see how it looks on paper. If it seems to work, it can stay. If it doesn't (and to me this one sounds pretty bad, like Spiro Agnew crossed with Robert Jordan), well that delete key is on your machine for a good reason.

Kate's mother gets straight to the point. "You'll go to that cult over my dead body." Lost in The Ark p. 5

The was of the sexes will never be solved because we spend too much time in the enemy's camp.

Ultimately, Agnew failed to save himself. But he left a scorched-earth battle plan for any corrupt officeholder that followed: Attack the investigation as a witch hunt. Obstruct it behind the scenes. Attack individual investigators in personal terms. Attack the credibility of the Justice Department itself. Attack the media informing Americans about the case.

The whole country had gone through a spasm of shudders during those eight months, but she had hardly noticed. The marches, the cops in their crash helmets and gas masks, the mounting attacks on the press by Agnew, the Kent State shootings, the summer of violence as blacks and radical groups took to the streets—those things might have happened on some TV late show.

No doubt Agnew felt it helped his cause to get that little bit of fiction out there again in 1980. But he had made a critical error at a critical time. By writing about the conversation with White, Agnew had waived any attorney-client privilege that protected exchanges with his lawyer. And that mistake was a very big reason why Spiro Agnew, finally, would get some measure of comeuppance.

No other speaker at that convention was allowed to ignore the time limit laid out for him in the split-second script, but Goldwater was encouraged to rave and snarl at the cameras until he ran out of things to say. His speech set the tone for the whole convention, and his only real competition was Ronald Reagan. Compared to those two, both Agnew and Nixon sounded like bleeding-heart liberals.

Ultraliberalism today translates into a whimpering isolationism in foreign policy, a mulish obstructionism in domestic policy, and a pusillanimous pussyfooting on the critical issue of law and order.

Why sermonize about the superiority of your ideas and values when it was so much more effective to attack the motives and character of your opponents, to call them names, to question their love of country. The vice presidency of Spiro T. Agnew marked the birth of the bruising, know-nothing confrontational conservatism that has been eating the lunch of seemly, Kiwanis Club Republicanism ever since.

NIXON: Accuse you of what? AGNEW: Accuse me of— NIXON: Putting the pressure on them to make contributions? AGNEW: No, he may say he gave me a kickback of some kind. Came over here and handed me $50,000. Totally ridiculous. But— NIXON: Oh, God. AGNEW: I mean, they say it. I don’t know what this guy’s liable to say. NIXON: And Ted, they’re— AGNEW: They say he gave a federal judge some money. There are all kinds of rumors. NIXON: Good God, isn’t it awful? AGNEW: But this man is— NIXON: Well, can we destroy him?

Nixon’s machinations with Congress weren’t all that much more cynical than those of some other American presidents. But his commitment to making sure the American people didn’t trust one another really was something distinctive. He often charged Agnew with the nastier part of this work, especially when it came to attacking the press and liberal intellectuals. “Dividing the American people has been my main contribution to the national political scene,” Agnew later said. “I not only plead guilty to this charge, but I am somewhat flattered by it.”121

Senator Beall, they believed, owed the White House a favor because Nixon and Agnew had helped him get elected three years earlier. George and Glenn Beall’s father had lost his Senate seat in 1964; when it came up again in 1970, Nixon and Agnew personally helped Glenn avenge the loss by campaigning for him in Maryland, multiple times. And it worked: the Republican Party got that Senate seat back, and so did the Beall family. Now one of the Beall sons was going to try to destroy Spiro Agnew with this investigation? No. Nixon and Agnew decided it was time for Glenn Beall to return the favor and lean on his little brother, the prosecutor.

Nixon was finding enemies everywhere: among liberals, the bureaucracy, on Capitol Hill, and in the press. “We can have peace. We can have prosperity. We can have all the blacks screwing the whites,” and still not get credit from the liberal establishment, he complained. His orders sometimes sounded like the mutterings of a paranoid. He had his staff comb through the microfilm at the D.C. public library and compile every Drew Pearson column dating back to 1946 that mentioned his name. “Agnew must be warned,” Nixon had told Haldeman and others, back during the campaign. “A candidate has no friends in the press—they are all enemies.” He underlined the word no four times.

Into this maelstrom, this present elaboration of the slave quarters, this rehearsal for a concentration camp, we place, armed, not for the protection of the ghetto but for the protection of American investments there, some blank American boy who is responsible only to some equally blank elder patriot… The white cop in the ghetto is as ignorant as he is frightened, and his entire concept of police work is to cow the natives. He is not compelled to answer these natives for anything he does; whatever he does, he knows that he will be protected by his brothers, who will allow nothing to stain the honor of the force. And he is assured of the rightness of his court and the justice of his bigotry every time Nixon, or Agnew, or Mitchell - or the governor of the state of California - open their mouths.

And George H. W. Bush did it. He delivered the message to Senator Glenn Beall, who then relayed that pressure to his brother George. George Beall donated his papers to Frostburg State University in Maryland. In those records is an official “memo to file” from July 1973, acknowledging the attempted intervention. “With respect to conversations with my brother Glenn,” Beall writes, “the discussions were most superficial and very guarded. He occasionally mentioned to me the names of persons who had been to see him or who had called him with respect to the Baltimore County investigation. Names of persons that I remember him telling me about included Vice President Agnew, [the engineer] Allen Greene [sic] and George Bush….The only specific information that he passed along to me that I can recall related to a complaint that he had heard from Bush to the effect that attorneys in this office were said to be harassing persons who had been questioned by us in the Baltimore County investigation.

True patience consists in bearing what is unbearable.

You remember that landscape of mine, for which Agnew offered me such a huge price, but which I would not part with? It is one of the best things I have ever done. And why is it so? Because, while I was painting it, Dorian Gray sat beside me. Some subtle influence passed from him to me and for the first time in my life I saw in the plain woodland the wonder I had always looked for, and always missed

A year later, Maurice Rappaport at the University of California in San Francisco announced results that told the same story, only more strongly so. He had randomized eighty young newly diagnosed male schizophrenics admitted to Agnews State Hospital into drug and non-drug groups, and although symptoms abated more quickly in those treated with antipsychotics, both groups, on average, stayed only six weeks in the hospital. Rappaport followed the patients for three years, and it was those who weren’t treated with antipsychotics in the hospital and who stayed off the drugs after discharge that had—by far—the best outcomes. Only two of the twenty-four patients in this never-exposed-to-antipsychotics group relapsed during the three-year follow-up. Meanwhile, the patients that arguably fared the worst were those on drugs throughout the study. The very standard of care that, according to psychiatry’s “evidence base,” was supposed to produce the best outcomes had instead produced the worst. “Our findings suggest that antipsychotic medication is not the treatment of choice, at least for certain patients, if one is interested in long-term clinical improvement,” Rappaport wrote. “Many unmedicated-while-in-hospital patients showed greater long-term improvement, less pathology at follow-up, fewer rehospitalizations, and better overall functioning in the community than patients who were given chlorpromazine while in the hospital.

During the trip to the NATO base, Agnew noticed something that made him wary. “I observed four F84F aircraft . . . sitting on the end of a runway, each was carrying two MK 7 [nuclear] gravity bombs,” he wrote in a document declassified in 2023. What this meant was that “custody of the MK 7s was under the watchful eye of one very young U.S. Army private armed with a M1 rifle with 8 rounds of ammunition.” Agnew told his colleagues: “The only safeguard against unauthorized use of an atomic bomb was this single G.I. surrounded by a large number of foreign troops on foreign territory with thousands of Soviet troops just miles away.” Back in the United States, Agnew contacted a project engineer at Sandia Laboratories named Don Cotter and asked “if we could insert an electronic ‘lock’ in the [bomb’s] firing circuit that could prevent just any passerby from arming the MK 7.” Cotter got to work. He put together a demonstration of a device, a lock and coded switch, that functioned as follows: “[a] 3-digit code would be entered, a switch was thrown, the green light extinguished, and the red light illuminated indicating the arming circuit was live.

If your version of Christianity involves a miserable submission rather than a glorious opportunity, you just don’t get it.

The ones nearest to sin are often those who believe they are beyond it.

You'll go to that cult over my dead body.

Things could be worse now. Agnew could be the Vice-President.

you are looking for?

later disgraced Vice President Spiro Agnew. “In the United States today, we have more than our share of nattering nabobs of negativism. They have formed their own 4H club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.

Agnew resembled an oversized big toe.

Things... are not always what they seem." the first quotes comes to us in chapter 2: Conspiracy Theory, By Officer Duke Agnew investigating a drowning death on the western shore in the shadow of the Chesapeake Bay bridge.

Resurrecting the tactics of Joe McCarthy, Agnew called Humphrey "squishy soft on communism." He observed, "If you've seen one slum, you've seen them all." The Washington Post concluded that Agnew was "perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul."55

Before she could speak again, he asked, “Is that my cloak?” “Yes.” She held it out to him, but he didn’t take it. “Why did you bring it back? I realize it is worn, but—” “No.” She almost gasped the word, and when she reached out to touch his chest, her hand brushed hardness. She snatched her hand back. “It isn’t that, sir. You were most generous to allow me to borrow it.” “It was a gift. Yours to keep.” His heartfelt statement shook her down to her boots. “I thank you. It kept me warm. I…it was on my bed and kept me comfortable during this last cold snap.” “Then why did you bring it back?” he asked, his voice gentle. “My parents insisted I return it.” His lips tightened, and muscles in his jaw worked. He turned away and stared out the window. “I see. Though I’m not surprised.” “I’m sorry, sir. I did not mean to offend.” “Offend?” Once more he turned towards her, and his hand came up. She flinched and drew back. He frowned, but his voice was soft. “Did you think I was going to hit you?” He clasped her shoulders and leaned in close. “Listen to me. I’d never raise a hand to you. I don’t hurt women or children. I’ve never beaten a woman or child, nor will I suffer anyone to do so.” Realizing that she trembled from head to toe, Adrenia closed her eyes and took a shivering breath. Her muscles, which had locked tight, eased. “Goddess.” He rubbed her shoulders. “I was only reaching to do this.” He lifted his left hand slowly and touched her uneven hairline. “Who did this to you, Adrenia?” When she wouldn’t answer, he continued. “Were your parents angry about this cloak?” His hand brushed over her hair, then her cheek in a touch that made her want to melt like a kitten under a caress. “They say it isn’t appropriate for an unmarried woman to take a gift from a soldier.” His eyebrows went up. “Even an officer?” “Not any man.” He sniffed. “It’s as I told your father. No daughter of mine, no woman who belonged to me would go without protection from the elements.

I was invited,” said Johnny in his monologue, with transparently faux joviality, “in the same sense that Spiro Agnew was invited to return the money.

Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase. Thus “Ronald Wilson Reagan” becomes “Insane Anglo Warlord”; “Spiro Agnew” becomes -Grow a Penis.

Mrs. Agnew wasn’t the kind of woman that made me think about romance. She reminded me of an unmade bed.

In the 1830s the British East India Company grew and processed the drug (Opium) in eastern India. Foreign traders with China buying tea, silk and porcelain were obliged to pay in silver so a trade imbalance grew. The traders wanted a product they could sell back to China. One answer was opium. There were soon one million addicts of a population 400 million and when the Chinese government tried to ban opium’s importation, officials were bribed and even more opium was smuggled in. ...Britain produced the drug (Opium) as a government monopoly and fought two wars to stop China from banning its import.

...James looks up to see Stanley Hewitt leaning though. He doesn't like Stan-a florid ham hock of a man who talks to him loudly and slowly, as if he's hard of hearing, who makes stupid jokes that start 'George Washington, Buffalo Bill, and Spiro Agnew walk into a bar…

Slowly, an anti-protest, anti-Black approach to policy took shape in the Nixon White House, with Agnew as its public face. The basic premise of the approach was that America had been for far too long pulled to the left by a too-vocal minority of Americans—Blacks, Latinos, women, students, pacifists, the media, and out-of-touch intellectuals. The Democratic Party’s catering to these groups had resulted in little more than lawlessness, epitomized by the riots. The only way forward for America, the Nixon campaign posited, was leadership that reflected the values of the “silent majority” and a return to “law and order.

Troublingly, the various reports disseminated by the FBI were often misleading if not outright inaccurate. In one teletype sent to the director of the Domestic Intelligence Division of the FBI, as well as to the White House and the U.S. attorney general, at 11:58 p.m. on September 9, the Buffalo office reported that during the riot “the whites were reportedly forced into the yard area by the blacks” and Black Power militants there were rounding up not just employee hostages but also all white prisoners, which was misleading in that it suggested a race riot was unfolding.42 More inflammatory still, the FBI’s Buffalo office stated that the prisoners “have threatened to kill one guard for every shot fired [at them]”; that they “have threatened to kill all hostages unless demands are met”; and that all of the hostages “are being made to stand at attention” out in D Yard.43 None of this proved to be the case. During the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s the FBI was deeply invested in destabilizing and undermining grassroots organizations that it considered a threat to national security—as were the politicians, such as Nixon, Agnew, and Mitchell, who supported its efforts and relied on its briefings.44 One of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs in this period—COINTELPRO—was notorious for using rumor and outright fabrication stories in an attempt to destroy leftist, antiwar, and civil rights groups from within. For this reason Commissioner Oswald’s determination to keep negotiating with the men in D Yard infuriated much of the Bureau. As one internal FBI memo put it, state officials had “capitulated to the unreasonable demands of prisoners.”45 And these weren’t just any criminals; as the FBI noted on multiple occasions, “The majority of the mutinous prisoners are black.”46 As dusk fell over D Yard on the first day of the Attica uprising, FBI and State Police rumors about black prisoners’ threats and outrageous actions only multiplied. But no matter how hostile everyone else was to the idea of the state negotiating with the prisoners, Commissioner Russell Oswald insisted even more forcefully that he was going to see these talks through.

Richardson offered a theory as to why these chaos architects (Buchanan, Agnew, Gingrich, even Reagan) and those who benefitted from their systems were able to manipulate and experiment with the government: because “they expected that the guardrails would hold. I always think of them like toddlers: toddlers fight against their parents because they know their parents aren’t going to throw them in the trash, and they behave well for someone who they think might throw them in the trash. They could do all this because they knew they could get away with it, because American democracy was so strong. They were provocateurs deliberately, to put themselves in power. They were all about power.” Unfortunately, it paid off. The toddlers continued taking advantage of waves of populism and national anger, while their system of disruptive governance empowered or inspired antagonistic characters beyond the Capitol, like talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

Seraii nodded approvingly. The unicorns brought teeth.

You are young, Wrath, a Veiled Death elder said. I feel the need to help you...once.

What is death if not a game? Wrath asked.

I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won’t deceive you except in matters of this sort. —Spiro T. Agnew

It would appear that we are nearly out of time," Janine Silva said, eying her vintage Spiro Agnew wristwatch....

this.  There has never been a political organization as powerful or as fearsome as the Democrat National Committee.  Yes, there have been tyrants and despots.  There have been Huns and kings and Caesars, but there has never before been a religion-party that could command armies and navies, buy up priests and popes, and reign with blood and horror on the earth for so long.  The oath and covenant to be robed with the priesthood in this organization requires a commitment of the soul.  You cannot leave.  You cannot even die to avoid your obligation.  In return, you will be provided a charm of favor.  The laws of men will not be able to hold you.  The bounty of all nations will be yours for the taking.  The innocent and hard-working people of the world are your sheep to be shorn or slaughtered by your command.  In place of joy you will be provided seemingly endless pleasure.  In place of serenity, you will be driven by the dogs of greed who never tire and never stop.  In place of love, you will receive virgins and children for sex.  In place of salvation, you will receive a long life of power and more wealth than a hundred men could spend in a hundred lifetimes. For some, the cost of this religion-party is too great.  For others, the lure is too great, and life is too short to be wasted trying to earn one’s way to wealth.  Besides, that type of wealth can be stripped away with a single lawsuit by someone who wants it more than the person who earned it.  The promise of eternal life is a shiny and sweet smelling counterfeit of exaltation.  Who wants to eat cold rice, when one can have a tender and juicy steak with the finest wines?  Who wants to heal the sick or feed five thousand when one can have his or her name put on the wing of a hospital or command the harvest of a nation?

It doesn't matter what you or I think about God. It matters what God thinks about God.

Jesus built his church on the truth – not on the opinion.

I don't want your version of God. You don't need my version of God. We just desperately need God.

When Nixon won the nomination on the first ballot, James Reston of The New York Times called it “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.” For his running mate Nixon picked Spiro Agnew, the once-moderate governor of Maryland, who had won conservative support for the hard and dismissive line he’d taken toward African American leaders after the Baltimore riots following the death of Dr. King.

Do you know why we’re not uptight about the press and the espionage business? One White House aide – not Mr Ziegler – asked rhetorically the other day. ‘Because we believe that the public believes that the Eastern press really is what Agnew said it was – elitist, anti-Nixon and ultimately pro-McGovern’.

But that didn’t mean that there wasn’t reaction, and he felt it sharply in late 1970 when Ace Books published columns one through fifty-two as The Glass Teat. Initial orders were so strong that Ace ordered another press run, and in August of that year, they contracted him to write The Other Glass Teat as soon as he’d generated enough additional columns to fill a second book. A late 1971 pub date was anticipated. Only it didn’t happen. Not only did The Other Glass Teat not come out as promised, sales of The Glass Teat suddenly dropped off sharply. An inside source in Sacramento leaked to Ellison that his name had been placed on then California Governor Ronald Reagan’s “subversives list.” The nomination had come from Richard Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew. Agnew was personally offended by Ellison’s repeated digs at his repressive policies and smarmy (and, as it turned out, hypocritical) morality. According to Ellison, word had been spread to bookstores and distributors to keep The Glass Teat off the market despite its popularity. Ace was forced to cancel their contract, telling Ellison to keep half of the advance. The embargo held until 1975 when Ace, sensing that the market had calmed, republished The Glass Teat and announced The Other Glass Teat as part of a twelve-book run of Ellison reissues and new titles.

As for his White House bêtes noirs, “Nothing much has happened,” Ellison wrote in an introduction to the 1983 reprint, “nothing much except … Agnew and Nixon proved all the warnings I trumpeted about their evil were accurate.” Whether one chooses to believe that there was a conspiracy of bookstores toeing the Nixon Administration’s repressive line, at the very least one comes away realizing that the people who control the flow of information in America think that television is a far more powerful medium than movies; otherwise why would they spend so much effort controlling it?

Dragon or not, going to a brewery is always a priority. You'll understand when you're older," his uncle replied cheekily.

You cannot make a mountain from a mouse. It is magic, not a miracle- Seraii