“I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog. I have always supported measures and principles and not men. I have acted fearless and independent and I never will regret my course. I would rather be politically buried than to be hypocritically immortalized.”
David Crockett, after his electoral defeat in 1830, as quoted in David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (1994), by James Atkins Shackford, p. 133.