Top 60 Adlai E. Stevenson II Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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 E. Stevenson II

Featured in: Victory Quotes

2. “It’s hard to lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

3. “Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

5. “Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don’t forget when you leave why you came.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

6. “In America, anybody can be president. That’s one of the risks you take.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

7. “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 E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

9. “A hungry man is not a free man.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

11. “Protocol, alcohol, and Geritol.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

13. “Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

14. “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 E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

16. “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.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

17. “All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

18. “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 E. Stevenson II

19. “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 E. Stevenson II

20. “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 E. Stevenson II

21. “Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

27. “I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

28. “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 E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

31. “Law is not a profession at all, but rather a business service station and repair shop.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

32. “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 E. Stevenson II

33. “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.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

34. “He who slings mud generally loses ground.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

35. “Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

36. “Freedom rings where opinions clash.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

37. “We have confused the free with the free and easy.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

39. “I don’t want to send them to jail. I want to send them to school.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

40. “Flattery is all right so long as you don’t inhale.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

41. “The human race has improved everything, but the human race.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

44. “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 E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

47. “Some people approach every problem with an open mouth.”

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II

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

— Adlai E. Stevenson II