Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Adlai E. Stevenson

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

She was the kind of person who would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.

When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.

There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not.

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

Not to destroy but to construct, I hold the unconquerable belief that science and peace will triumph over ignorance and war that nations will come together not to destroy but to construct and that the future belongs to those who accomplish most for humanity.

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

And all our troubles, all our immense difficulties, now and in the future, can I say, be solved if we have the will, the courage, the boldness to face them, face them square.

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

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.

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

Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol.

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

The university is the archive of the Western mind, it's the keeper of the Western culture, ... the guardian of our heritage, the teacher of our teachers, ... the dwelling place of the free mind.

Someone asked me...how it felt and I was reminded of a story that a fellow townsman of ours used to tell--Abraham Lincoln. They asked him how he felt once after an unsuccessful election. He said he felt like a little boy who had stubbed his toe in the dark. He said that he was too old to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh.

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.

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.