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• Today we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between communistic atheism and Christianity. The modern champions of communism have selected this as the time, and ladies and gentlemen, the chips are down — they are truly down.
  • Speech in Wheeling, West Virginia (9 February 1950)

• I have here in my hand a list of 205 . . . a list of names that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department. ...
  As you know, very recently the Secretary of State proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes — being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust — high treason. ... He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted, warped thinkers are swept from the national scene so that we may have a new birth of honesty and decency in government.
  • Speech in Wheeling, West Virginia (9 February 1950)

Quotes about McCarthy

• Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
  • Joseph Welch, in response to McCarthy accusing Fred Fisher, one of the employees of Welch's law firm, of being a Communist. (Transcripts and audio of the exchange between Welch and McCarthy

• The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.
  • Senator J. William Fulbright (D-Arkansas)

• Thank God somebody's doing it.
  • FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, of McCarthy's investigations.

• When the wind is right, a faint odor of kerosene is exhaled from Senator McCarthy.
  • Ray Bradbury, author.