Politics & Power Quote by Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday talks like a man slamming a fist on the pulpit because he knows he is also slamming a fist on the ballot box. The line opens with a theatrical sigh - "After all is said" - a move that pretends the debate is exhausted, that evidence is settled, that only moral clarity remains. Its not an argument so much as a verdict. That posture matters: Sunday was a revivalist star in the years when temperance was mutating from church concern into national policy, and he speaks as if the country is one bad habit away from collapse.

The intent is sweeping social discipline. By stacking "the individual, the family, politics and business", Sunday turns drinking into a universal solvent eating through every layer of American life. Its a preacher's version of systems thinking, minus the nuance: booze is not a symptom of economic stress or male loneliness or industrial misery; it is the master cause. The subtext is powerfully pragmatic. If liquor can be blamed for private failure and public corruption, then banning it becomes not merely permissible but urgent, a kind of national cleansing.

The rhetoric hinges on contamination. "Degrading" is less about pleasure than descent, a fall from citizenship into animal appetite. "Everything that you touch" is intimate and paranoid at once, imagining vice as transferable, staining homes, elections, payrolls, reputations. "This old world" adds weary apocalyptic flavor: not a modern policy fight, but a timeless battle between salvation and rot. Its why the sentence works. It offers absolution through a single enemy, and it gives a chaotic era a clean target.