Quotes from Adlai Stevenson I

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

Golf is a fine relief from the tensions of office, but we are a little tired of holding the bag.

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

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

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.

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

Making peace is harder than making war.

A man doesn't save a century, or a civilization, but a militant party wedded to a principle can.

Here, in the dread tribunal of last resort, valor contended against valor. Here brave men struggled and died for the right as God gave them to see the right.

Men may be born free; they cannot be born wise; and it is the duty of the university to make the free wise.

A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.

It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming.

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

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

Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.

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

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

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

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.

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

Our strength lies, not alone in our proving grounds and our stockpiles, but in our ideals, our goals, and their universal appeal to all men who are struggling to breathe free.

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

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