Adlai E. Stevenson quotes:

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share
  • We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on it's vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to it's security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.

  • A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

  • Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don't forget when you leave why you came.

  • I have been thinking that I would make a proposition to my Republican friends... that if they will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

  • I'm not an old, experienced hand at politics. But I am now seasoned enough to have learned that the hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

  • Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.

  • Do you know the difference between a beautiful woman and a charming one? A beauty is a woman you notice, a charmer is one who notices you.

  • You know, you really can't beat a household commodity - the ketchup bottle on the kitchen table.

  • After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.

  • The relationship of the toastmaster to speaker should be the same as that of the fan to the fan dancer. It should call attention to the subject without making any particular effort to cover it.

  • The journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. So we must never neglect any work of peace within our reach, however small.

  • Law is not a profession at all, but rather a business service station and repair shop.

  • If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.

  • We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.

  • On the plains of hesitation lie the blackened bones of countless millions who at the dawn of victory lay down to rest, and in resting died.

  • A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.

  • Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

  • We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments.

  • I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread.

  • The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.

  • I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.

  • It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.

  • To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man - and also a nation.

  • Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity - in short, of tyranny - and it is committed to making tyranny universal.

  • Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

  • I have tried to talk about the issues in this campaign... and this has sometimes been a lonely road, because I never meet anybody coming the other way.

  • We mean by 'politics' the people's business - the most important business there is.

  • Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.

  • I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.

  • You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.

  • Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

  • Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.

  • There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.

  • The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.

  • Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.

  • As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.

  • It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.

  • Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

  • The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.

  • That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

  • The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal - that you can gather votes like box tops - is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

  • Freedom rings where opinions clash.

  • Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.

  • My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

  • Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.

  • The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.

  • On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

  • A hungry man is not a free man.

  • All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

  • When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.

  • Nixon is finding out there are no tails on an Eisenhower jacket.

  • He who slings mud generally loses ground.

  • Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

  • When you leave here, don't forget why you came. ( to college graduates)

  • Flattery is all right if you don't inhale

  • An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff

  • A diplomat's life is made up of three ingredients protocol, Geritol and alcohol

  • I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread

  • Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol

  • Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

  • The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.

  • There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.

  • Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.

  • In quiet places, reason abounds.

  • What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.

  • An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

  • It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man-not a color.

  • A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.

  • In America, anybody can be president. That's one of the risks you take.

  • I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.

  • You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news.

  • Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

  • The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty.

  • Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

  • Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

  • Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

  • We have confused the free with the free and easy.

  • The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

  • Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.

  • Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

  • Not to destroy but to construct, I hold the unconquerable belief that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war that nations will come together not to destroy but to construct and that the future belongs to those who accomplish most for humanity.

  • The university is the archive of the Western mind, it's the keeper of the Western culture, ... the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, ... the dwelling place of the free mind.

  • She was the kind of person who would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

+1
Share
Pin
Like
Send
Share