It is hard to see taxing plastic bags as one of the great issues of our time that merits the foremost place in our finest statesmen's minds. It is an absurd little issue, a picayune proportion of household waste, and a pointless inconvenience in people's lives.

Jacob Rees-Mogg

If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.

Abigail Adams

There are too many politicians in the world and too few statesmen.

Adi Godrej

Kissinger was surely one of the very few statesmen to try to do something positive to break the log jam of the Cold War; to try to end the war in Vietnam; to bring a halt to the cycle of war in the Middle East.

Alistair Horne

For if the Germans do not help defend the West, American and Canadian troops must cross the seas to do the job, and I venture to believe that the troops - if not the statesmen - regard this as an interference at least in their own domestic affairs.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Moreover, war has become a thing potentially so terrible and destructive that it should have been the common aim of statesmen to put an end to it forever.

Arthur Henderson

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

Benjamin Disraeli

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.

Bob Edwards

I have always been thankful that so many of our country's greatest leaders and statesmen were able to be on this earth at the same time and place to draft the Constitution.

Bob Latta

The miracle of the American experiment was not the result of a natural sequence of events. An exceptionally virtuous and educated cadre of statesmen broke away from the politics of millennia and created something new. Only by this political miracle do Americans enjoy our freedoms.

Chad Wolf

We need a government, not politics. Because there's too much politics. Of course there should be debate. But there seems to be so much pettiness and not enough good faith. It is civilized to agree to disagree, and this idea is slowly disintegrating. The great statesmen of the past knew this, and I think it helps drive civilization.

Daphne Guinness

If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual.

Eisaku Sato

At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.

Ellen Key

We forget that the most successful statesmen have been professionals. Lincoln was a professional politician.

Felix Frankfurter

Certain it is that a great responsibility rests upon the statesmen of all nations, not only to fulfill the promises for reduction in armaments, but to maintain the confidence of the people of the world in the hope of an enduring peace.

Frank B. Kellogg

Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

I'm always concerned that I'm insulting the elder statesmen on the set by my crass behavior.

Heather Langenkamp

Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.

Hector Hugh Munro

Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.

Henry Grunwald

And the annual meetings of the League's Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.

Hjalmar Branting