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.
— Adlai Stevenson I
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.
Freedom rings where opinions clash.
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.
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.
Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.
Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.
A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.
He who slings mud generally loses ground.
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
An Independent is someone who wants to take the politics out of politics.
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
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 journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step. So we must never neglect any work of peace within our reach, however small.
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
In quiet places, reason abounds.
Making peace is harder than making war.
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.
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
We mean by 'politics' the people's business - the most important business there is.
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
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.
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
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.
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
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.
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.
I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.
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.
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.
Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.
Laws are never as effective as habits.
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.
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.
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.
A hungry man is not a free man.
It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.
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.
On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.
Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
We have confused the free with the free and easy.
