Senator Dirksen Quotes

As usual, the day guard at the Dirksen Building glares at him as he slides through security. She’s certain he was the one who vandalized the sign outside one particular senator’s office to read BITCH MCCONNELL, but she’ll never prove it.

I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Two days after the president spoke, the Senate majority leader, Democrat Mike Mansfield, and the minority leader, Republican Everett Dirksen, together introduced a bill to guarantee voting rights to African Americans. A similar bill was soon introduced in the House of Representatives. Over ferocious opposition by Southern congressmen, the bill passed in both houses. On August 6, 1965, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

An inquisitorial momentum developed into a full-blown attack on anyone who was seen to be un-American: first of all communists, then left-wingers, then homosexuals, who, with their perceived weakness, softness and feminine ways, were considered a threat to the ideal of martial masculinity – ‘lavender lads’, as the right-wing senator Everett Dirksen called them in 1952.