Elmer Gantry Quotes

The Maker of the universe with stars a hundred thousand light-years apart was interested, furious, and very personal about it if a small boy played baseball on Sunday afternoon.

He had, in fact, got everything from the church and Sunday School, except, perhaps, any longing whatever for decency and kindness and reason

He had learned how to assemble Jewish texts, Greek philosophy, and Middle-Western evangelistic anecdotes into a sermon. And he had learned that poverty was blessed, but that bankers make the best deacons.

And though he had almost flunked in Greek, his thesis on 'Sixteen Ways of Paying a Church Debt' had won the ten-dollar prize in Practical Theology.

Elmer Gantry never knew who set him thirty dimes, wrapped in a tract about holiness, nor why. But he found the sentiments in the tract useful in his sermon, and the thirty dimes he spent for lovely photographs of burlesque ladies.

The Reverend Elmer Gantry was reading an illustrated pink periodical devoted to prize fighters and chorus girls in his room at Elizabeth J. Schmutz Hall late of an afternoon when two large men walked in without knocking. "Why, good evening, Brother Bains—Brother Naylor! This is a pleasant surprise. I was, uh— Did you ever see this horrible rag? About actoresses. An invention of the devil himself. I was thinking of denouncing it next Sunday. I hope you never read it—won't you sit down, gentlemen?—take this chair— I hope you never read it, Brother Floyd, because the footsteps of—

And when Elmer was about to slip out to the kitchen with her to make lemonade, Benham held him by demanding, 'What do you think of John Wesley's doctrine of perfection?' 'Oh, it's absolutely sound and proven,' admitted Elmer, wondering what the devil Mr. Wesley's doctrine of perfection might be.

lead an almost irritatingly pure life, but who had no

Street, and she was able to give Elmer the three hundred

Morning always promises miracles.

Elmer Gantry was drunk. He was eloquently drunk, lovingly and pugnaciously drunk.

Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.

the Fundamentalists' crusade. ("Outrageous!" from the leonine gentleman.) They were mild enough now; they spoke in the name of virtue; but give them rope, and there would be a new Inquisition, a new hunting of witches.

Well, he'd get help from the Bible. It was all inspired, every word, no matter what scoffers like Jim said. He'd take the first text he turned to and talk on that. He opened on: 'Now THEREFORE, Tatnai, governor beyond the river, Shethar-boznai, and your companions the Apharsachites, which ARE beyond the river, be ye far from thence,' an injunction spirited but not at present helpful.

It was not an esthetic room. Though Frank Shallard might have come to admire pictures, great music, civilized furniture, he had been trained to regard them as worldly, and to content himself with art which 'presented a message,' to regard 'Les Miserables' as superior because the bishop was a kind man, and 'The Scarlet Letter' as a poor book because the heroine was sinful and the author didn't mind.

(There is a Northern and Southern convention of this distinguished denomination, because before the Civil War the Northern Baptists proved by the Bible, unanswerably, that slavery was wrong; and the Southern Baptists proved by the Bible, irrefutably, that slavery was the will of God.)

sinclair "They were obsessed by the gaffer in Terra Haute who got converted every single night in the meetings. He may have been insane and he may have been a plain drunk.

They were obsessed by the gaffer in Terra Haute who got converted every single night in the meetings. He may have been insane and he may have been a plain drunk.

He was in that most blissful condition to which a powerful young man can attain—unrighteous violence in a righteous cause.

Don’t be scared of upsetting folks ’coz most of ’em are topsy-turvy anyway, and you’ll only be putting ’em back on their feet.

The gospel crew could never consider their converts as human beings, like waiters or manicurists or brakemen, but they had in them such a professional interest as surgeons take in patients, critics in an author, fishermen in trout.

Ah, nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to palpitate. Cato learned Greek at eighty; Sophocles Wrote his grand Œdipus, and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers, When each had numbered more than fourscore years.

Though Elmer was the athletic ideal of the college, though his occult passion, his heavy good looks, caused the college girls to breathe quickly, though his manly laughter was as fetching as his resonant speech, Elmer was never really liked. He was supposed to be the most popular man in college; every one believed that everyone else adored him; and none of them wanted to be with him. They were all a bit afraid, a bit uncomfortable, and more than a bit resentful. It was not merely that he was a shouter, a pounder on backs, an overwhelming force, so that there was never any refuge of intimacy with him. It was because he was always demanding. Except with his widow mother, whom he vaguely worshiped, and with Jim Lefferts, Elmer assumed that he was the center of the universe and that the rest of the system was valuable only as it afforded him help and pleasure.

I say, “The Elmer Gantry act is very convincing, but why pretend you’re Wormwood? That doesn’t make any sense.