Adlai E. Stevenson Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

In America any boy may become President, and I suppose it's just one of the risks he takes.

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.

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.

And all our troubles, all our immense difficulties, now and in the future, can I say, be solved if we have the will, the courage, the boldness to face them, face them square.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

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

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.

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.

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

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

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

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

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

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

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

Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol.

There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

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

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.