Quotes from Helms' memoir

Quotes from Helms' memoir

'The president of the United States -- whom I knew twenty years earlier as an honorable gentleman -- told me he had no knowledge of a burglary and was not party to any cover-up. The president of the United States gave me his word. I assumed he was telling the truth.'

- On why he defended President Nixon during the Watergate scandal

'Truly, if regular campaigns are legally sanctioned war, then my campaigns were often the equivalent of nuclear war.'

- On his Senate races

'How can the major media be so wrong so often? The answer is obvious: They are profoundly out of sympathy with the ideals and goals of the American people.'

- On the news media

'Let's be honest. We had been, and still are, being asked to fund sex acts on stage, countless homoerotic movies, photographs, and so-called 'film festivals.' From burning the American flag to desecrating their own (and one another's) bodies, the depravity of these self-proclaimed 'artists' knew no bounds.'

- On fighting federal funding for controversial art

'It is hardly coincidence that banishing the Lord from the public schools has resulted in the schools being taken over by a totally secularist philosophy. Christianity has been driven out. In its place has been enshrined a sort of permissiveness in which the drug culture has flourished, as have pornography, crime, and fornication -- in short, everything but disciplined learning.'

- On removing group prayer from the schools

'I and others have been criticized for comparing the scourge of abortions with the Holocaust, but I reject such criticism because this is indeed another kind of Holocaust, by another name. ... At latest count, more than 40 million unborn children have been deliberately, intentionally destroyed. What word adequately defines the scope of such slaughter?'

- On abortion

'Perhaps nothing in my thirty years in the Senate has been more twisted and misunderstood than my stand in opposition to the creation of a federal holiday to honor the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. My decision was based on the facts, not on personality and certainly not on race.'

- On Martin Luther King Jr.

"There were even some charges that the ad was intended as 'racist' but that was untrue as well -- minority classifications were not limited to race, and we had no more interest in a race-based vote than we did in race-based jobs."

- On the racial quota ad used to defeat Democrat Harvey Gantt in the 1990 Senate race