Dan Quayle quotes

[Daniel E.]

"I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."

~ apocryphal quote of former US Vice President Dan Quayle

A couple more Quaylisms:

"For NASA, space is still a high priority."

"[It's] time for the human race to enter the solar system."

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure."

“It's wonderful to be here in the great state of Chicago.”

“My friends, no matter how rough the road may be, we can and we will, never, never surrender to what is right.”

"The future will be better tomorrow."

 

[Yuray]

Good post!.....it was fitting, an ironic that Quayle was succeeded by Gore. If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check. Dan Quayle

from wikipedia: Throughout his time as vice president, Quayle was widely ridiculed in the media and by many in the general public, in both the U.S. and overseas, as an intellectual lightweight.[12] Contributing greatly to the perception of Quayle's incompetence was his tendency to make public statements which were either self-contradictory ("The holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.… No, not our nation's, but in World War II. I mean, we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century, but in this century's history."), impossible ("I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future") or confused and inappropriate, as when he addressed the United Negro College Fund, whose slogan is "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," and said, "You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one's mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is."[13]

Shortly after Bush announced the Space Exploration Initiative, which included a manned landing on Mars, Quayle was asked his thoughts on sending humans to Mars. In his response he made a number of errors: "Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]....Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."[14]

His most famous blunder occurred when he corrected student William Figueroa's correct spelling of "potato" to "potatoe" at an elementary school spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey, on June 15, 1992.[15][16] Although he was relying on cards provided by the school which included the misspelling, Quayle was widely lambasted for his apparent inability to spell the word "potato". According to his memoirs, Quayle was uncomfortable with the version he gave, but did so because he decided to trust the school's incorrect written materials. Figueroa was a guest on Late Night with David Letterman and was asked to lead the Pledge of Allegiance at the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

On May 19, 1992, Quayle gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California on the subject of the Los Angeles riots. In this speech, Quayle blamed the violence on a decay of moral values and family structure in American society. In an aside, he cited the single mother title character in the television program Murphy Brown as an example of how popular culture contributes to this "poverty of values", saying: "t doesn't help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid, professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another 'lifestyle choice.'" Quayle drew a firestorm of criticism from feminist and liberal organizations and was widely ridiculed by late-night talk-show hosts for this remark.

The "Murphy Brown speech" became one of the most memorable incidents of the 1992 campaign. Long after the outcry had ended, the comment continued to have an effect on U.S. politics. Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history and the author of several books and essays about the history of marriage, says that this brief remark by Quayle about Murphy Brown "kicked off more than a decade of outcries against the 'collapse of the family.'"[17] In 2002, Candice Bergen, the actress who played Brown, said "I never have really said much about the whole episode, which was endless, but his speech was a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did."[18]