“Strange but true” — there are quotes by Lord Byron you probably didn’t know you knew…

Although Lord Byron (George Gordon Noel Byron) is one of the most famous of all English poets, few of us can recite a lot of lines from his poems.

Thanks to some popular modern biographies, Ken's Russell's movie Gothic (1986), the BBC drama Byron (2003), and other movies and TV shows, many people are aware that Byron had an outrageously wild personal life.

It was a life crammed full of sex (including affairs with both male and female lovers and probably his own sister), drugs (opium in particular) and rocky relations with the British Establishment, which he repeatedly poked in the eye with his scandalous lifestyle and radical liberal politics)

As memorably summed up by one of his many lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, Byron was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.”

In fact, I’d guess more people are familiar with Byron’s proto-rock ‘n’ roll star reputation than his poetry.

There are some lines from Byron poems which are familiar to almost everyone.

The best-known is “She walks in beauty, like the night,” the opening words of his poem “She Walks in Beauty” (published in 1815).

Another bit of verse written by Byron popularized two idiomatic expressions you undoubtedly know and have probably used, though you may not know they come from one of his poems.

On December 17, 1823, Cantos XII, XIII and XIV of Byron’s epic satirical poem Don Juan were first published.

Canto XIV contains the lines:

“‘Tis strange — but true; for Truth is always strange;
       Stranger than fiction.”

Those words by Byron are generally credited as the origin of the sayings “strange but true” and “truth is stranger than fiction.”

So, while few people know it, they are paraphrasing a quotation by Byron when they use those phrases — both of which could aptly be applied to aspects of Byron’s personal life.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…

“Greed is good!” – the famous movie misquote and it’s real life inspiration

On December 11, 1987 Oliver Stone’s film Wall Street was released in U.S. theaters.

The movie stars Michael Douglas as Gordon Gekko, a mega-rich, ethically-challenged Wall Street investor who specializes in corporate takeover schemes.

Gekko has no pangs about taking over, gutting, and reselling companies regardless of the impacts on employees and local communities.

In fact, he’s proud of his takeover record, as he explains in the memorable speech he gives that includes the line usually misquoted as “Greed is good,” a shortened version of what Douglas actually says.

That now familiar saying is partly based on an actual speech given by the real-life Wall Street investor and money manipulator Ivan Boesky.

On May 18, 1986, Boesky gave the commencement address at the UC Berkeley’s School of Business Administration.

At the time, Boesky was a widely admired financial wizard who was riding high.

One of the things he told the students was this proto-Gekko quote.

     “Greed is all right, by the way. I want you to know that. I think greed is healthy. You can be greedy and still feel good about yourself.”

Boesky was feeling a tad less good the following year, when he was convicted of filing false trading records and sentenced to three years in prison, after also paying a record $100 million to settle a conviction for insider trading.

Boesky’s rise and fall and his infamous Berkeley quote were part of Oliver Stone’s inspiration for Wall Street.

Gekko clearly echoes Boesky in the scene in which he calls greed good.

In that scene, he’s speaking to a meeting of shareholders of the company Teldar Paper, which he wants to take over.

To encourage them to approve his takeover bid, he tells them he has studied the company and found that the current management is wasting money and shortchanging shareholders.

Then he says:

“I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms – greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge – has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you.”

The Teldar shareholders like what Gekko says and give him a standing ovation.

And, despite the fact that Gekko is a slimy character who is ultimately goes to prison for insider trading involving another company, and despite the financial scandals and meltdowns that happened before and after Wall Street was released, there are many people who like and essentially agree with the philosophy he expresses in that speech.

It’s fits the Ayn Randian “enlightened self-interest” creed of hard core advocates of business and opponents of “over-regulation” – a subset of people who have increasingly dominated American politics.

The end of Wall Street is somewhat uplifting. Gekko goes to jail and Bud Fox, the young protégé who initially helped him in a crooked takeover scheme (played by Charlie Sheen), blows the whistle on Gordon and redeems himself.

If Gekko existed in real life, he’d probably view the current push to reduce the regulation of businesses and financial markets as uplifting.

Indeed, events of the past few years might remind many people of something else Gordon Gekko says in Wall Street. 

He explains to Charlie Sheen’s character:

“The richest one percent of this country owns half our country’s wealth, five trillion dollars...We make the rules, pal. The news, war, peace, famine, upheaval, the price per paper clip. We pick that rabbit out of the hat while everybody sits out there wondering how the hell we did it. Now you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you buddy?”

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related viewing and reading…

“He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

In the 1630s, England’s infamous “Star Chamber” (sort of a politically-oriented version of the Spanish Inquisition) banned the printing or sale of “any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets.”

The Star Chamber was abolished in 1641.

But two years later, the British House of Commons passed a new censorship law.

Although it was called a book “licensing” law, it was more about limiting free speech and creating publishing monopolies for politically-connected publishers than it was about protecting the rights of authors (or readers).

Books deemed to be in violation of the “Licensing Order of 1643” were seized and destroyed. And, the writers, printers and publishers of those books faced prison sentences.

This angered England’s great poet John Milton and inspired him to write a “speech” urging more liberal publishing laws.

The full title of the printed version was Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton For the Liberty of Unlicens’d Printing, To the Parlament of England. (The complete text is online here.)

Now generally referred to as Areopagitica for short, it was first published, in pamphlet form, on November 23, 1644.

Milton’s Areopagitica is among the most famous historical documents advocating freedom of the press ever written. (The title alludes to the ancient Greek judges of Areopagus.)

One line in it is still frequently quoted today and included in many books of quotations:

“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.”

Milton’s eloquent words failed to persuade Parliament to change its book “licensing” and censorship regulations. They remained in effect until 1694, 20 years after Milton’s death.

Of course, in the centuries since then, censorship of books has significantly and steadily decreased, at least in the United Kingdom, the United States and other Western democracies.

But even in those countries efforts to ban books from public libraries has continued.

For example, during the first decade of the 21st Century, the American Library Association documented more than 4,000 attempts to have various book removed from local libraries here in the US.

Some modern self-appointed censors want to ban books that conflict with their religious or political views. Some want to block access to books they deem “pornographic.”

Other reasons given for requesting books to be banned from American libraries in recent years include things like sexism, “anti-family” content and uses of the N-word, one of the common complaints lodged against Mark Twain’s classic novel Huckleberry Finn.

In fact, the targets of people and groups who want to ban books at their local libraries include many major literary classics, such as: 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
1984 by George Orwell
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild by Jack London

You can read a longer list of examples on the “Banned & Challenged Classics” page of the ALA’s website.

If John Milton were still around to see that list, I’m pretty sure it he be angered again.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading…

“Spare the rod and spoil the child”

It’s not surprising that many people think the quote “Spare the rod and spoil the child” comes from the Bible.

There are at least five verses in the Bible’s Book of Proverbs that talk about using a rod to beat a child — for his own good, of course.

The most famous is Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”

An even scarier piece of parenting advice is in Proverbs 23:13-14. It says: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. / Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”

However, although the saying “spare the rod and spoil the child” was clearly inspired by these Biblical verses, it does not appear in the Bible.

It comes from the epic-length 17th-century poem ”Hudibras”, written by Samuel Butler (1612-1680), a cheeky British poet who enjoyed mocking religious extremists and hypocrites.

Butler’s epic satire follows the trials and tribulations of a character named Sir Hudibras.

Initially, the poem describes Hudibras as a noble and pious knight.

But during the course of the story he is shown to be a buffoonish poseur and nitwit.

Butler published Hudibras in three parts, in 1663, 1664 and 1678. The famous “spare the rod” quote comes in Part II, which was entered into the Stationer’s Registry (Britain’s early version of a copyright office) on November 5, 1663.

At the end of Part I, Sir Hudibras is put in prison after getting into a fracas with a group of locals who were watching a bear baiting “entertainment.”

In Part Two, a widow Hudibras had been wooing comes to visit him in jail and says she’ll get him out if he’ll prove he truly loves her.

When he tries to profess his love, she quickly rejects flowery words as the kind of proof she wants:

       “Hold, hold, quoth she; no more of this,
       Sir Knight; you take your aim amiss:
       For you will find it a hard chapter                         
       To catch me with poetic rapture.”

The widow then suggests that Hudibras could prove his love by attempting suicide. For example, she says, if he tried to hang himself she would believe him and cut him down before he died.

Hudibras thinks that option sounds a bit “too harsh.”

So, the widow suggests that Hudibras could prove his love by whipping himself or by letting her whip him. She then explains the benefits of the “virtuous school of lashing.”

Near the end of her spiel on the joys of the whip, the widow utters the famous “spare the rod” quotation:

       “If matrimony and hanging go
       By dest’ny, why not whipping too?                           
       What med’cine else can cure the fits
       Of lovers when they lose their wits?
       Love is a boy by poets stil’d;
       Then spare the rod and spoil the child.”

Hudibras promises to enroll in the “school of lashing” if the widow gets him released.

She does. But then Hudibras reneges on his promise, a betrayal that sets up the plot of Part III of the poem, in which Hudibras gets his final comeuppance.

Samuel Butler was almost certainly thinking of the Biblical verses about rods and children when he wrote his own famous line about them.

When read or heard out of context, it may seem like Butler’s “spare the rod and spoil the child” quote has a meaning similar to the Bible verses — i.e., parents should discipline their children with physical punishment if they want them to turn out “right” and keep them from becoming spoiled brats or worse.

But what Butler implied in between the lines of his satiric verse is a bit more bawdy than Biblical.

The obvious theory, given the scene it’s used, in is that it refers to sexual fetishes involving spanking, whipping and a dominatrix.

Another theory is that it’s a reference to an old bit of sexual folklore about how to “spoil” — and thus prevent — a woman from becoming pregnant.

One thing is certain: what Samuel Butler was talking about in that part of his poem Hudibras is a bit different than what the pious authors of the Book of Proverbs had in mind.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading…

“She was the people’s princess” (but not the first) . . .

In 1995, after she was separated from but still married to Britain’s Prince Charles, Princess Diana said in a BBC television interview: “I’d like to be a queen in people’s hearts.”

For many people, she was.

Diana became and remains beloved for her high-profile support for various charities, like the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, her un-Royal-like rapport with the public and, of course, for her beauty.

Her tragic death in a car accident in Paris on August 31, 1997 led to a huge outpouring of emotion from those who knew her and from the public.

Tony Blair, Leader of Britain’s Labour Party, was British Prime Minister at the time of Diana’s fatal crash.

On the night of her death, he was one of many notable people the press asked for reactions.

Blair’s widely-published response was poignant and memorable. He said:

       “She was the people’s princess and that is how she will stay, how she will remain in our hearts and our memories forever.”

Since then, the phrase “the People’s Princess” has been inextricably linked to Diana.     

In his Yale Book of Quotations, quote expert Fred Shapiro notes that Blair wasn’t the first person to use that nickname for her.

More than a decade earlier, it had appeared in a souvenir booklet about Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s 1983 tour of Australia.

The heading of a section in in that publication was “Diana: the People’s Princess.”

However, it was Blair’s more widely-publicized use that made the phrase forever associated with the beautiful, doomed “Princess Di.”

Diana was not the first British Royal to be called “the People’s Princess.”

A century earlier, Royal watchers and the press used that nickname for Princess Mary Adelaide, the Duchess of Teck (1833-1897).

This reflected the fact that Mary Adelaide was one of the first of “the Royals” to actively support a broad range of public charities.

Indeed, if she had been as stunningly beautiful as Diana, she might be more widely known today. Alas…

Well, you can judge for yourself about Mary Adelaide’s looks. Her other nickname was the highly unflattering moniker “Fat Mary.”

The photo shown here is one of the better ones I could find of the first “Peoples Princess.”

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…

Bring me the head of John the Baptist – and Alfredo Garcia...

Director Sam Peckinpah’s 1974 film Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, starring Warren Oates, is one of my favorite movies from the Seventies.  

The film’s title comes from a line in the movie said by the main villain El Jefe (played by actor Emilio Fernández).

When El Jefe finds out his daughter has had a secret affair with his gang member Alfredo Garcia and is pregnant, he puts a hit out on Garcia, saying: “I will pay one million dollars. Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia!”

That second line is a modern descendant of a famous Biblical quotation associated with the date August 29.

About 2,000 years ago, according to the Bible, a rabble-rousing, hair-shirt-wearing, locust-and-honey-eating preacher known as John the Baptist mightily annoyed King Herod and his family.

Herod had married his own niece and they had a daughter.

Righteous John publicly denounced the marriage as incestuous and against Jewish law.

Herod threw John in prison. Not long after, the king threw himself a birthday party.

The featured entertainer was his daughter.

She’s not named in the Bible, but historical accounts say she was Salome – the one known for the exotic “Dance of the Seven Veils.”

Salome apparently tripped the light fantastic in an especially pleasing way at Herod’s birthday bash.

He told her he wanted to reward her by giving her anything she wanted.

At the suggestion of her mother, Salome replied: “Give me here John Baptist’s head in a charger.” 

That’s the original King James Bible version of what she said, in Matthew 14:8. It uses the old English word charger, meaning a large platter or dish.

Later translations and paraphrases of the line generally used platter, giving rise to more commonly heard variations like “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a platter” (English Standard Bible version) and “Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a platter” (the King James 2000 Bible translation).

This led to the English idiom “to bring (or have) someone’s head on a platter,” which is a figurative way of suggesting that someone will be punished severely. 

Of course, in the Bible story (and in the movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia) it was a literal punishment.

Herod gave Salome her wish, by ordering John’s head to be cut off and brought to her on a platter.

In the centuries since then, August 29 has been the traditional date the Catholic, Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches have used to commemorate the beheading and martyrdom of John the Baptist.

Alfredo Garcia, the beheaded movie character, is less widely remembered.

But he does have a special place in the hearts of Sam Peckinpah and Warren Oates fans like me.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing… 

“Yonder lies the castle of my fodder.” The famous movie “quote” that Tony Curtis didn’t say…

When actor Tony Curtis died at age 85, in September 2010, many obituaries and tributes mentioned what is widely believed to be one of his most famous movie lines.

In those articles, and in many books of quotations, the line is usually given as either “Yonder lies the castle of my fodder” or “Yonder lies the castle of my faddah.”

According to legend he was saying the word father with a Bronx accent that reflected where he grew up.

Sometimes you’ll find it written as “Yonder lies the castle of my fodda” or “Yonder lies the castle of my fadda.”

Sometimes yonder is spelled yonda or yondah. It is also quoted in the more linguistically and less snarky accent-free variation “Yonder lies the castle of my father.”

Some websites and books claim Curtis said the line in his 1951 film The Prince Who Was a Thief.

Some claim it’s from his 1954 movie The Black Shield of Falworth.

Other sources say Curtis uttered the line in yet another of his early adventure flicks, Son of Ali Baba, which was released on August 15, 1952.

In fact, Curtis didn’t say that line in any of his movies.

But the Son of Ali Baba attribution comes closest to being the right one — up to a point.

Curtis does say something that includes the words yonder and father in Son of Ali Baba. But he doesn’t say “Yonder lies the castle of my father.” And, he doesn’t say father with a heavy New York accent that makes it sound like fodder or faddah.

I’ve watched Son of Ali Baba. Several times. (Yes, I love cheesy vintage adventure movies and Tony Curtis.)

If you watch Son of Ali Baba yourself (or just zoom ahead to about 30 minutes in), you can hear the actual words that Curtis speaks to his co-star Piper Laurie. 

What he says is: “This is my father’s palace. And yonder lies the Valley of the Sun.”

The story of how those lines morphed into the much-mocked misquote “Yonder lies the castle of my fodder” was recalled by Curtis in his autobiography American Prince: A Memoir (2008).

Ironically, in that, even Tony misremembered the original lines.

Curtis wrote:

     Son of Ali Baba was the movie where I gave a line that people unjustly made fun of for years afterward. There’s a scene where I’m on horseback and Piper is sitting next to me, and I say to her, “Yonder in the valley of the sun is my father’s castle.” After the film came out, Debbie Reynolds, who would later marry Eddie Fisher, went on television and said, “Did you see the new guy in the movies? They call him Tony Curtis, but that’s not his real name. In his new movie he’s got a hilarious line where he says, ‘Yonder lies the castle of my fodda.’”
     You could chalk her ridicule up to my New York accent, but when she mentioned the issue of my real name on television, I began to wonder if there was something anti-Semitic going on there. I’m probably just hypersensitive on that topic. But either way, she got the line wrong! Unfortunately, her version stuck with the public, and for a while it became popular for people to quote the incorrect line in a ridiculous New York accent.
     Years later, Hugh Hefner came up to me at a party and said, “Yonder lies the castle of my fodda.”
     I looked at him coolly. “Hef. I never said that.”
     “Then don’t tell anybody,” he said. “It makes a great movie story.”

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and swag…

“You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

July 9th is the anniversary of one of the most famous political speeches in history, the “Cross of Gold Speech” by William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925).

Bryan, one of America’s most charismatic and gifted orators, made the speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on July 9, 1896. (For some reason, many books and websites, including normally credible sources like Britannica.com, give the date as July 8, 1896. I triple-checked it. The correct date is July 9.)

Bryan’s address that day is called the “Cross of Gold Speech” because of his fiery, oft-cited closing lines:

       “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

The speech contains another line about the importance of agriculture to society that also appears in many books of quotations:

       “Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

The meaning of Bryan’s words about farms is easy to grasp: their existence and an adequate food supply is crucial to civilization.

The meaning and context of the “cross of gold” quote is more complicated.

So were the political views of William Jennings Bryan.

He was something like a cross between Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Like them, he was a populist politician.

He was a member of the Democratic Party and served as a Democratic Congressman for Nebraska from 1891 to 1895. But his primary allegiance was to his own moral principles and beliefs and his own hard core supporters, the majority of whom were low-income farmers and working people in rural areas of the country.

Bryan was known (and portrayed himself) as a strong advocate for the “common man” against wealthy businessmen and corporations. But Black Americans and immigrants were not among the common people Bryan cared about.

During the 2016 presidential campaign in an interesting article titled “Is Bernie Sanders Our William Jennings Bryan?” historian Michael Kazin noted: “Bryan and nearly all other Democrats in his day were unabashed defenders of Jim Crow. Their populism halted abruptly and cruelly at the color line. Neither did the eloquent Bryan, widely known as the Great Commoner, say much to defend the millions of common Jewish and Catholic immigrants who suffered from discrimination at the hands of his fellow native-born white Protestants.”

On the other hand, Bryan was an early supporter of the Women’s Suffrage movement and helped push for passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right vote.

But that partly reflected the fact that, like Bryan, most white Suffragettes supported state Prohibition laws and the 18th Amendment, which banned the manufacture, transportation and sale of liquor.

He was also a fundamentalist Christian who became one of the most high-profile critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. Most notably, Bryan defended the state of Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution in schools in the infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial.”

Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech focused on the debate over “bimetallism,” one of the biggest, most controversial monetary policy issues in the late 1800s. It’s an arcane, now outdated issue that’s a bit hard to grasp and summarize. Here’s my layman’s attempt…

From the end of the Revolutionary War until 1873, money in the United States was “backed” by deposits of both silver and gold and the U.S. government minted both gold and silver coins. This “bimetallic standard” required the government to buy significant quantities of both metals.

During the mid-1800s, as more and more silver was mined in the U.S., that artificially propped up silver prices and benefitted owners of silver mines, which were primarily located in Western states.

It also caused creeping inflation in the costs of certain basic goods, such as agricultural products. That benefitted Midwestern and Western farmers but tended to increase living costs for most other working people. In addition, monetary inflation hurt banks and other lenders, by eroding the value of their loans.

In 1873, Congress passed a law ending bimetallism and moving the U.S. to the “gold standard” used in the United Kingdom and a number of other countries.

Midwestern and Western states opposed the change and pushed for a return to bimetallism, especially after the U.S. was hit by a severe economic depression in 1893.

William Jennings Bryan became a prominent leader of their “Free Silver” movement, which wanted the government to go back to bimetallism and mint an unlimited amount of silver-backed money on demand.

In his convention speech on July 9, 1896, Bryan framed the issue as a battle between “prosperous” people in big cities and “the struggling masses.” It was sort of a rural-based “trickle up” theory.

       “The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it,” he said. “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.”

Bryan also took a shot at the idea that the U.S. should care about other countries’ monetary policy, much like some modern politicians attack free trade, globalism and the Paris climate change agreement.

       “Our ancestors, when but three million, had the courage to declare their political independence of every other nation upon earth,” he opined. “Shall we, their descendants, when we have grown to seventy million, declare that we are less independent than our forefathers? No, my friends...instead of having a gold standard because England has, we shall restore bimetallism, and then let England have bimetallism because the United States have.”

Here’s the full final paragraph of his speech, showing the context of his famous “cross of gold” line:

       “If they dare to come out in the open field and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses, we shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

Bryan had used versions of the crown of thorns/cross of gold lines in previous speeches. But no speech he’d ever made generated so much attention or had such an effect.

At the end of his address, the convention delegates cheered and applauded Bryan wildly and carried him on their shoulders.

Reports of his speech and its reception were published in newspapers throughout the country. It made him a national celebrity and earned him the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in the 1896 election.

His campaign slogan was “No Crown of Thorns, No Cross of Gold.”

Republicans and Republican-leaning editors viewed Bryan as a dangerous demagogue, whose “free silver” proposal would make America’s economic problems even worse.

The majority of “the struggling masses” were also leery of Bryan’s call for a return to bimetallism. That November, Bryan was soundly defeated by Republican candidate William McKinley.

Nevertheless, he remained a Democratic superstar. He received the party’s nomination for president again in 1900 – and lost again to McKinley.

Bryan ran for president a third time in 1908, but lost in a landslide to Republican nominee William Howard Taft.

However, in the realm of famous quotations, Bryan ultimately beat both of them. Neither McKinley nor Taft ever said anything cited by thousands of books and websites like Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” quotes are.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Questions? Email me or post them on my Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading and viewing…