Adlai Stevenson II
(1900-1965)

American Politician, UN Ambassador, Social Reform Advocate

1961 Father of the Year
1964 James Madison Award for Distinguished Public Service

birthdate: February 5
birthplace:
Los Angeles, California

QUOTES

A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular.

A hungry man is not a free man.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

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

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

I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread.

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.

Making peace is harder than making war.

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

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

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

The human race has improved everything, but the human race.

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,

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

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

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

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.

It is often easier to fight for principles than to live up to them.

The world is now too small for anything but "the truth" and too terrible for anything but "brotherhood."

Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.

Our strength lies, not alone in our proving grounds and our stockpiles, but in our ideals, our goals, and their universal appeal to all men who are struggling to breathe free.

I have been told that one of the reasons the astronomers of the world cooperate is the fact that there is no one nation from which the entire sphere of the sky can be seen. Perhaps there is in that fact a parable for national statesmen, whose political horizons are all too often limited by national horizons.

 

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