Adlai E. Stevenson Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions. All change is the result of a change in the contemporary state of mind.

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

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

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

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.

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

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

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

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

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.

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

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

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

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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