Adlai E. Stevenson's Quotes

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

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

Making peace is harder than making war.

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.

Nature is neutral.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

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

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

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.

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

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.

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

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

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

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

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

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

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.

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

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

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