Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by Adlai Stevenson I

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American politician Adlai Stevenson I.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Adlai Ewing Stevenson was an American politician who served as the 23rd vice president of the United States from 1893 to 1897. He had served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After his appointment as assistant postmaster general of the United States during Grover Cleveland's first administration (1885–1889), he fired many Republican postal workers and replaced them with Southern Democrats. This earned him the enmity of the Republican-controlled Congress, but made him a favorite as Grover Cleveland's running mate in 1892, and he was elected vice president of the United States.

American - Politician | October 23, 1835 - June 14, 1914

Source: Wikipedia

A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.

Adlai Stevenson I

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

In quiet places, reason abounds.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

Adlai Stevenson I

Newspaper editors are men who separate the wheat from the chaff, and then print the chaff.

Adlai Stevenson I

The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.

Adlai Stevenson I

He who slings mud generally loses ground.

Adlai Stevenson I

Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.

Adlai Stevenson I

Laws are never as effective as habits.

Adlai Stevenson I

Making peace is harder than making war.

Adlai Stevenson I

It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.

Adlai Stevenson I

A hungry man is not a free man.

Adlai Stevenson I

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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 I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

Freedom rings where opinions clash.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

We have confused the free with the free and easy.

Adlai Stevenson I

Peace is the one condition of survival in this nuclear age.

Adlai Stevenson I

Every age needs men who will redeem the time by living with a vision of the things that are to be.

Adlai Stevenson I

There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.

Adlai Stevenson I

Nature is neutral.

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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 I

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.

Adlai Stevenson I

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.

Adlai Stevenson I

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 I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

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

Adlai Stevenson I

Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.

Adlai Stevenson I