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
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
You can tell the size of a man by the size of the thing that makes him mad.
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.
A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.
It's hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
He who slings mud generally loses ground.
A hungry man is not a free man.
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.
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
Flattery is all right so long as you don't inhale.
Making peace is harder than making war.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
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.
Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.
To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man - and also a nation.
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum.
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.
A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.
Freedom rings where opinions clash.
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.
Change is inevitable. Change for the better is a full-time job.
Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.
Man does not live by words alone, despite the fact that sometimes he has to eat them.
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
Accuracy to a newspaper is what virtue is to a lady; but a newspaper can always print a retraction.
A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.
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.
What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is for the most part incommunicable.
Journalists do not live by words alone, although sometimes they have to eat them.
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.
There was a time when a fool and his money were soon parted, but now it happens to everybody.
I don't want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.
We have confused the free with the free and easy.
All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.
On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.
The human race has improved everything, but the human race.
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.
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.
Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.
In quiet places, reason abounds.
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.
Nixon is finding out there are no tails on an Eisenhower jacket.
