Adlai Stevenson I
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.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Beauty
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.Collection: Politics
A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.Collection: Beauty
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.Collection: Travel
It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.Collection: Funny
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.Collection: Equality
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.Collection: Money
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.Collection: Relationship
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.Collection: Car
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.Collection: Future
We mean by 'politics' the people's business - the most important business there is.Collection: Politics
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Death
An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.Collection: Politics
Nature is neutral.Collection: Nature
If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.Collection: Truth
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.Collection: Wisdom
A hungry man is not a free man.Collection: Freedom
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.Collection: Society
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.Collection: Faith
Freedom rings where opinions clash.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Politics
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.Collection: Politics
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.Collection: Alone
To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man - and also a nation.Collection: Cool
Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.Collection: Change
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.
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
He who slings mud generally loses ground.
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.
Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
Law is not a profession at all, but rather a business service station and repair shop.
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.
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
In quiet places, reason abounds.
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
Making peace is harder than making war.
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.
I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.