Quote/Counterquote: The chickens have come home to roost

November 22, 2009

Asses, atheists, elephants, donkeys and cows “come home to roost”

QUOTE:

“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye...America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
       Rev. Jeremiah Wright (b. 1941)
       Commenting on the September 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
       In a “sermon” he gave on September 16, 2001

COUNTERQUOTE:

“Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by [Jerry] Falwell and [Pat] Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content.”
       Christopher Hitchens (b. 1949)
       English-American author, journalist and advocate for atheism
       In his column in The Nation, October 8, 2001

GOP ELEPHANT QUOTE:

“All of this infusion of trillions of trillions of spending by this administration and this Congress comes home to roost...It roosts in the back pockets of small business owners in this country, which this [Obama] administration has done zip for.”
       Republican Party Chair Michael Steele (b. 1958)
       Commenting on recent GOP gubernatorial recent wins in Virginia and New Jersey
       Interview on ABC News, November 8, 2009

DEMOCRAT DONKEY QUOTE:

“Some people say don’t count your chickens before they're hatched. Well, the Republicans have already hatched their chicken in this campaign and George Bush is a dead duck.”
       Sen. Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy (1932-2009)
       Speech at the Democratic National Convention on July 19, 1988
       Incorrectly predicting that Democrat Michael Dukakis would beat George H.W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election (though Bush’s goose was cooked by Bill Clinton in 1992)

NAKED COW QUOTE:

“Looks like the cows have come home to roost.”
Leslie Nielsen (b. 1926) as Lt. Frank Drebin
In the movie Naked Gun 2½ (1991)

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November 19, 2009

“The chickens have come home to roost” – and, the chicks, cows and geese

INFAMOUS QUOTE BY MALCOLM X:

“President Kennedy never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon...Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they always made me glad.”
       Black Muslim leader Malcolm X (1925-1965)
       His answer when asked how he felt about John F. Kennedy’s assassination
       Press conference, December 1, 1963

MALCOLM’S EXPLANATION:

“It was, as I saw it, a case of ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, had finally struck down this country’s Chief Magistrate.”
Malcolm X, trying to explain his infamous “chickens” quote
In The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley (1964)

JACK NICHOLSON VARIATION:

“I heard somewhere that there are three times as many single women over forty as single men. That’s what we got from the women’s movement. The chickens have come home to roost.”
Actor Jack Nicholson
In Esquire magazine’s regular quotation feature “What I’ve Learned,” Jan. 2004

CASH COW VERSION:

“People also have used their homes as ATMs, borrowing against the value. That cash cow has dried up with the slumping housing market and, as the saying goes, the chickens have come home to roost. Except now there's no roost.”
Denver Post editor, Dan Haley
Editorial, March 23, 2008