Time & Perspective Quote by Huey Long

Huey Long twists a pious civic cliché into something more dangerous: a wink at the moment when “principle” becomes a luxury item and power becomes the only language that matters. He’s riffing on the old typing exercise - “The time has come for all good men to come to the aid of their country” - but swaps in “rise above principle,” turning moral seriousness into an obstacle to be cleared. It’s both joke and doctrine. The humor disarms; the message recruits.

Long’s specific intent is to legitimize tactical ruthlessness in the name of a larger good. “Good men” are summoned not to defend a constitution or a code, but to transcend them - conveniently right when a movement needs discipline, loyalty, and a tolerance for hardball. It reframes compromise and coercion as moral courage. If you hesitate, you’re not principled; you’re timid.

The subtext is Long’s populist bargain: I will deliver for the forgotten, and you will stop asking how. That’s the psychological engine of his machine politics in Louisiana and the national “Share Our Wealth” pitch during the Depression. In an era when institutions looked captured and capitalism looked like a rigged game, he offered redistribution with a boss’s grin and a prosecutor’s instincts. The line flatters supporters as virtuous while pre-empting criticism as fussy sermonizing.

It works because it weaponizes a familiar moral category - “good men” - and then quietly empties “principle” of authority. Long isn’t rejecting ethics; he’s relocating them into results, and asking you to call that maturity. That’s how demagogues normalize the exceptional as everyday.