Adlai Stevenson II (1900–65) was an American politician and diplomat. Stevenson is renowned for his intellectual disposition, organizational skills, eloquent public speaking, and for advancing liberal ideologies within the Democratic Party.
Stevenson is also remembered for his significant landslide losses to popular war hero Dwight Eisenhower during both the 1952 and the 1956 presidential elections. Before the 1960 presidential election, Stevenson lost to Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy as the Democratic Party’s candidate. When Kennedy became president, Stevenson served as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations until his death in 1965.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Adlai Stevenson
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Survival
Power corrupts, but lack of power corrupts absolutely.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Power
Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Golf
On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.
—Adlai Stevenson
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.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Voting, Elections
We mean by “politics” the people’s business—the most important business there is.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Success, Politics, Being True to Yourself
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.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Elections, Voting
Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.
—Adlai Stevenson
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.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Nationalism, Nationality, Nation
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Civilization
Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Vision, Prophecy
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Politics, Politicians
Accuracy is to a newspaper what virtue is to a lady, but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Facts
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on it’s vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to it’s security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and the love we give our fragile craft.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Earth, Help, Cooperation
I sometimes marvel at the extraordinary docility with which Americans submit to speeches.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Speakers, Speaking
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
—Adlai Stevenson
The relationship of the toastmaster to the 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.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Attention, Speakers, Speaking
Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Peace
What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility… a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Patriotism
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. But it is not easy to banish the notion that there can be universal brotherhood just as soon as everybody gives up his faith and accepts ours. That day may never come, for the richness of human diversity cannot be abolished any more than Mars or Jupiter. Difference is the nature of life, it is part of our moral Universe. Without difference, life would become lifeless.
—Adlai Stevenson
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today – and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms
—Adlai Stevenson
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Journalism
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Writing
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Aging, Age
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
—Adlai Stevenson
A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Freedom, Society
Laws are never as effective as habits.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Habits, Habit, Law
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.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Goals
The central question is whether the wonderfully diverse and gifted assemblage of human beings on this earth really knows how to run a civilization.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Civilization
Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
—Adlai Stevenson
Topics: Speakers, Problem-solving, Speaking
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