“A ____________ is someone who won’t let a man have a steak because a baby might choke on it.”
ISTR Mark Twain saying that about Democrats, but I could just be talking out of my ass.
I’m pretty sure you’re talking out of your ass. The Democratic Party of Mark Twain’s day (and its political agenda) looked a lot different from the modern one. Essentially, the Democratic Party was the party of urban immigrants and laborers as well as poorer farmers. The Republican party represented more established natives, landed elites, and progressive-minded Christians (abolitionists, the temperance movement, the conservation movement, etc.).
The quote I’ve heard (also allegedly from Twain) is “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby may choke on it”.
Just did a quick Google and it seems that’s more or less the quote, but there seems to be some question of if Twain actually is the source.
Whaddaya mean? Whenever there’s some quote that you’re sure someone famous said, but you don’t know who it was, it’s always Mark Twain!
Well, or Benjamin Franklin.
Or maybe Shakespeare.
Unless it’s actually from the Bible.
Or, well, you get the point.
You left out Oscar Wilde.
*“There’s no bigger ass than a man who makes up quotes and attributes them to famous people”
*
Winston Churchill 
And George Carlin. If it’s about censorship, it’s definitely from George Carlin.
People didn’t care, many years ago, about a baby choking on a steak. This is, almost certainly, an invention from the last 20 years or so, when people got up in arms about the Environmental Protection Agency, The __________________ fill in the blank Agency.
There is nothing remotely resembling this, in any form, said by anyone prior to the last decade or so.
So what’s Thomas Jefferson, chopped liver???
hh
“What am I, chopped liver?” - Thomas Jefferson
That quote is often attributed to famous people, but was actually first said by Patty Defoy Grasse.
I’ve found the quote attributed to Mark Twain, but as to whether or not he actually said it, I don’t know. It’s “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.”
He supposedly said it in response to the Brooklyn Public Library removing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from it’s juvenile section in 1905.
The modern version is to say, sarcastically, “Won’t someone think of the children?”. It’s the same concern.