One I always wanted to see, when GWB was comparing himself to George Washington:
“Senator, I served with George Washington. I knew George Washington. George Washington was a friend of mine. Governor, you’re no George Washington.”
-Strom Thurmond to GW Bush.
This isn’t really a putdown, but it is one of my favorite quotes about politics. It comes from Beyond the Fringe. Jonathan Miller is explaining the American political system to Dudley Moore:
JONATHAN: [The Americans] have inherited our two-party system.
DUDLEY: How does that work?
JONATHAN: Well, they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and they have the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party.
Not to mention that “liberal” and “conservative” mean different things on that side of the pond from this one, anyway.
Reminds me of the time I used a rather juvenile “yo mama” type joke in boot camp, and my subject responded angrily, “You don’t know my mama!” To which I replied, “Well, I would recognize her by her scalp.”
I believe, my dear sir, that you are mistaken. I knew it (paraphrased) from memory, but just confirmed it by consulting Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 15th Ed. (Little, Brown and Co., 1980), p. 368, and The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations (Oxford Univ. Press, 1996), p. 389. Both attribute it to Sir Charles Petrie, The Four Georges (1935); the Oxford book calls it “probably apocryphal.”
Ah, Sir. You do not have the benefit of Fred Shapiro’s recent tome, The Yale Book of Quotations, which is the best researched quotation dictionary out there. While that quote was only attributed to Wilkes in 1935, the quote was attributed to Foote by one Percival Stockdale in his The Memoirs of the LIfe and Writings of Percival Stockdale(1809). It was quoted there as “Foote, I have often wondered what catastrophe would bring you to your end; but I think, that you must either die of the p-x, or the halter.”–“My lord,”(replied Foote instantaneously] “that will depend upon one of two contingencies;–whether I embrace your lordship’s mistress or your lordship’s principles.”
The hell you say, sir! 'Tis the first time I’ve ever heard that quotation so attributed. This Shapiro fellow is clearly a knave and a mountebank, and I daresay ill-informed as well. Away with him!
Disputed, but generally attributed to Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, in response to a (conservative) Country Party member’s, “I’m a Country member!”…
In watching Colin Powell testify before the UN about the “threat” Iraq posed the world, I couldn’t help but think, “Mr. Powell, you’re no Adlai Stevenson.”
It wouldn’t have worked. Quayle had just been saying he was like Kennedy. So knocking Kennedy would have ricocheted back on him. Besides, people like Kennedy - even a Republican like Quayle wanted to borrow his popularity - so insulting his memory would have been a losing strategy.
The way Quayle should have handled the remark would have been to toss out a Kennedyesque quip. His inability to come up with anything better than “That was really uncalled for, Senator” showed that Bentsen was right.