Billy Sunday Quotes

If you were in Bellingham, Washington in 1910 you would have heard Billy preach a sermon that the liquor industry offered him $1 million to quit preaching. He started this way:

"I'm the sworn eternal, uncompromising enemy of the liquor traffic. I've drawn the sword in the defense of God, home, wife, children and native land and I will never sheath it until the undertaker pumps me full of embalming fluid, and if my wife is still alive I think I shall call her to my bedside, and say, 'Nell, when I'm dead, you send for the butcher and skin me and have my hide tanned and made into drum heads and hire men go up and down the line and beat those drums and say, 'My husband Billy Sunday still lives and gives the whiskey gang a run for it's money.'"

"Listen, if I heard shrieks and crys coming from a house and I ran in there and I found a great big broad shouldered whiskey soaked Joe weasel, dragging his wife about by the hair, and over here, two children are unconscious from his blows and kicks and another one screaming in terror, do you think I would apologize for being there? No! I'd knock 7 kinds of pork out of that old hog."

"Listen, 1905, Kansas City voted out 250 saloons, 200 gambling houses and 60 houses of prostitution. They worried if they voted out the saloon they would ruin their economy but that wasn't the case. Next year bank deposits increased $1,700,000. Court costs went down $25,000. And new starts, building starts, new businesses, new homes went up 209%. Now before they voted out the saloon they were getting ready to add a new addition to the jail, but after the saloon's closed the jail doors swang idle on their hinges and even the poor house began to empty. The next year was 1906 and 600 children between the ages of 12-18 entered school for the first time in their life, because they didn't have to stay home and support a drunken father.

"Listen, I'm against sin. I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot. I'll fight it as long as I've got a fist. I'll butt it as long as I've got a head. And I'll bit it as long as I've got a tooth and when I'm old, fistless, footless and toothless I'll gum it till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition."

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