Politics & Power Quote by Ezra Cornell

Cornell is doing something shrewd here: he shrinks the Pope from an all-powerful boogeyman into a mere “shadow,” then flips the fear back onto the people selling it. The line is less about Rome than about America’s perennial vulnerability to moral panic. By opening with “I am too old to be frightened,” he claims the authority of experience, a businessman’s disdain for manufactured hysteria, and a citizen’s fatigue with the same con being rerun on each election cycle.

The real target is domestic: “a party” that traffics in anti-Catholic agitation to win votes. Cornell’s phrasing “exciting religious bigotry” reads like an indictment of political marketing before the term existed. He doesn’t grant bigotry the dignity of ideology; it’s a lever pulled to “acquire political power.” The nastiest word in the sentence is “duped.” It’s contemptuous, but also diagnostic: the followers aren’t presented as monsters so much as customers of a cynical product.

Context matters. Cornell lived through the decades when nativist movements like the Know-Nothings turned Catholic immigration into a loyalty test, implying that American Catholics were agents of a foreign sovereign. Cornell answers that paranoia with a hierarchy of threats: distant ecclesiastical authority is abstract; homegrown demagogues are concrete. The quote works because it refuses to debate theology and instead argues about civic damage. The harm isn’t heresy; it’s the corrosion of “the liberties of my country” when politicians teach citizens to fear their neighbors on command.