I suppose you all realize that as members of the court marshall for the trial of the conspirators in the assassination of our belo...ved president you have on your souls a grave responsibility. The object of this trial is not to determine the guilt or innocence of a handful of rebels but to save this country from further bloodshed. The solemn truth, gentlemen, is that the federal union is on the verge of hysteria. That is why the trial of these conspirators has been placed in your hands rather than in a civil court. Because men of the sword can be hard, and hardness is all that can save this country from riot, mob rule, even resumption of the war itself.... To help you to be hard, first, you must not allow your judgement in decision in this case to be troubled by any trifling technicalities of the law or any pedantic regard for the customary rules of evidence. Second, and most important, you must not allow yourself to be influenced by that obnoxious creation of legal nonsense--reasonable doubt.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fanta...sies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some year...s past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot be indifferent to the assassination of a member of my profession, We should be obliged to shut up business if we, the Kin...gs, were to consider the assassination of Kings as of no consequence at all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The drama of the assassination has enlarged the personalities of both men, so it is as if each of them could have saved us from th...e troubled history that followed their deaths. Had Lincoln lived, many historians believe, his generous spirit would have labored in peace, as mightily as it had in war, to heal the nation's wounds, and perhaps much of America's tortured post-Civil War history would have been different. After Lincoln's death, a profound despair seized the nation, along with a deep bitterness that lasted for years, but America endured and the process of nation-building went on. Had John F. Kennedy lived, Robert Kennedy once told a reporter, the 1960s would have been different because he would have listened more sensitively to the young. It is somehow reassuring that even in the desperate hours after each assassination, a shaken nation, gripped with near-panic, gathered its will, looked to its Constitution, and reasserted political order.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One of its [James A. Garfield's assassination] lessons, perhaps its most important lesson, is the folly, the wickedness, and the d...anger of the extreme and bitter partisanship which so largely prevails in our country. This partisan bitterness is greatly aggravated by that system of appointments and removals which deals with public offices as rewards for services rendered to political parties or to party leaders. Hence crowds of importunate place-hunters of whose dregs [the assassin] Guiteau is the type. The required reform [of the civil service] will be accomplished whenever the people imperatively demand it, not only of their Executive, but also of their legislative officers. With it, the class to which the assassin belongs will lose their occupation, and the temptation to try "to administer government by assassination" will be taken away.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Every two years the American politics industry fills the airwaves with the most virulent, scurrilous, wall-to-wall character assas...sination of nearly every political practitioner in the country--and then declares itself puzzled that America has lost trust in its politicians.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »