- [on his 1924 presidential campaign, 1923] We will be buffeted by politicians and press alike, our motives will be misconstrued, our actions will be distorted, our words will be misrepresented, but we will be men; and if in the end defeat comes, we can accept it with equanimity and philosophy, say good-by forever to our ambitions and live our lives in the consciousness that we fought a good fight, our fight, as we saw the light.
- [on his journalistic enemy Harrison Gray Otis of the Los Angeles Times, 1910] In the city from which I have come [San Francisco] we have drunk to the very dregs the cup of infamy. We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. We have had men who sold their birthright, we have dipped into every infamy. Even form of wickedness has been ours in the past; every debased passion and every sin has flourished. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco, nor did we ever have, as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that is disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent - that is Harrison Gray Otis.
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