Quotes from Adlai Stevenson I

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

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

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

In quiet places, reason abounds.

An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

A wise man who stands firm is a statesman, a foolish man who stands firm is a catastrophe.

Nature is neutral.

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.

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

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

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.