Huey Long: Quotes about learning

Huey Long was American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator. Explore interesting quotes on learning.

Huey Long: 40 quotes23 likes

“Mr. President, I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. I have not even had a high school education. But the things that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected.

I know the hearts of the People because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiana and another way here in the Senate.

I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education.

Nonetheless my voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it. Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done.”

Huey Long, U.S. Senate floor speech, March 5, 1935

“They kept on hollering, and I simply had to put my foot down. I said, 'I'm the governor and I say the ignorant in this state have to learn, blacks as well as whites.”

And they learned.
Huey Long on conservative resistance to illiteracy programs for Negroes (Williams p. 706)

“Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life's work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing.”

Number 7 in the sum and substance of the Share our Wealth program (1935); quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 74.

“We started them to school. They learned to read. They learned to work simple arithmetic problems. Now some of our plantation owners can't figure the poor devils out of everything at the close of each year.”

Huey Long on African American Education (Williams p. 524)