I think self-examination and criticism are the great and not-so-secret weapons of democracy.
When you sling mud, you lose ground.
A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.
Most of us favor free enterprise for business. Let us also favor free enterprise for the mind.
Let's talk sense to the American people.
—July 26, 1952 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination
Trust the people, trust their good sense, their decency, their fortitude, their faith. Trust them with the facts. Trust them with the great decisions.
What do we mean by patriotism in the context of our times? I venture to suggest that what we mean is a sense of national responsibility... a patriotism which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime.
Unreason and anti-intellectualism abominate thought.... But shouting is not a substitute for thinking and reason is not the subversion but the salvation of freedom.
Sometimes in the deafening clamor of political statesmanship, I've thought that the people might be better served if a party purchase a half hour of radio and television silence during which the audience would be asked to think quietly for themselves.
There are men among us who use 'patriotism' as a club for attacking other Americans.... What can we say for the man who proclaims himself a patriot — and then for political or personal reasons attacks the patriotism of faithful public servants...? Intolerance and public irresponsibility cannot be cloaked in the shining armor of rectitude and righteousness.
The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to the freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anti-communism.
Democracy cannot be saved by supermen, but only by the unswerving devotion and goodness of millions of little men.
—1955 speech
Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.
—September 12, 1952 speech, Albuquerque, New Mexico
The victory to be won in the twentieth century, this portal to the Golden Age, mocks the pretensions of individual acumen and ingenuity.
—1952 acceptance speech
Our reasonableness must always be motivated by the urge to learn, to share, and to find common ground.
The time to stop a revolution is at the beginning, not the end.
—September 9, 1952 speech, San Francisco, California
Your public servants serve you right.
—September 11, 1952 speech, Los Angeles, California
The power of the liberal way consists in helping ourselves and others to see some of the possibilities inherent in viewpoints other than one's own.
More important than winning the election, is governing the nation. That is the test of a political party — the acid, final test.
—July 26, 1952 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination
We should make greater use of the United Nations as an economic agency ... we believe, to be sure, that anything which strengthens economic growth, national independence, human welfare, and democratic process will improve a nation's resistance to the virus of communism. But our first purpose is human betterment, and anything else is a by-product.
—1956
Now, we will go about these things gradually, because it will be the spirit of man that will make the laws successful and make it possible to enforce them continuously. It will not be troops of bayonets. We will have to proceed gradually. You do not upset habits and traditions that are older than the republic overnight.... There is, however, a question of what time is tolerable to bring about the family of man in this country...(I) will do everything I can to bring about unity even if I have to ask some of you to come about it gradually.
—1956, comments regarding civil rights, Los Angeles, California
Government is more than the sum of all the interests; it is the paramount interest, the public interest. It must be the efficient, effective agent of a responsible citizenry, not the shelter of the incompetent and the corrupt.
—1948 speech in Bloomington, Illinois
After being struck by a sign swung by an angry woman, Stevenson said, I don't want to send her to jail, I want to send her to school.
The most American thing about America is the free common school system.
—1948 address to the Citizens' School Committee, Chicago, Illinois
The costliest blunders have been made by dictators who did not quite understand the working of real democracy and who mistook diversity for disunity.
The art of government has grown from its seeds in the tiny city-states of Greece to become the political mode of half the world. So let us dream of a world in which all states, great and small, work together for the peaceful flowering of the republic of man.
—June 17, 1965 speech at Harvard University
The goal of life is more than material advance; it is now and through all eternity, the triumph of spirit over matter, of love and liberty over force and violence.
If total isolationism is no answer, total interventionism is no answer, either. In fact, the clear, quick, definable, measurable answers are ruled out. In this twilight of power, there is no quick path to a convenient light switch.
—June 17, 1965 speech at Harvard University
We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy — for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals — than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source.
Nature is neutral. Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom. There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.
—September 18, 1952 speech at Hartford, Connecticut
When an American says that he loves his country, he...means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.
—August 27, 1952 speech at New York City, New York
This must be the context of our thinking — the context of human interdependence in the face of vast new dimensions of our science and our discovery...the awful majesty of outer space.
—July 9, 1965 speech in Geneva, Switzerland
In our interdependent world there is no longer any line of demarcation between social and political problems. The solution of one depends on how well we understand the other and the extent to which we succeed in doing both.
We doubt whether any nation has so absolute a grip on absolute truth that it is entitled to impose its idea of what is right on others.
There is nothing to fear in difference; this is in fact one of the healthiest and most invigorating of human characteristics without which life would become lifeless.
In a controversial speech Stevenson calls for an international nuclear test ban because it would announce our peaceful intentions and be, ...a step which would reaffirm our purpose to act with humility and a decent concern for world opinion.
Friends challenged Adlai's stand on the need for American engagement in Europe, which was tottering under the pressures of German, Italian and Spanish Fascism. He was accused of Trying to kill our sons. Stevenson was later to assert — I was only trying to save their sons, ...I was convinced that aide to Britain was the only way to stay out of the war.
We will not lose faith in the United Nations. We see it as a living thing and we will work and pray for its full growth and development. We want it to become what it was intended to be — a world society of nations under law, not merely law backed by force, but backed by justice and popular consent. We believe the answer to world war can only be world law. This is our hope and our commitment....
—1952 campaign radio address for United Nations Day
The search for peace will not end, it will begin, with the halting of these [nuclear] tests. What we will accomplish is a new beginning, and the world needs nothing so much as a new beginning. People everywhere are waiting for the United States to take once more the leadership for peace and civilization. We must regain the moral respect we once had and which our stubborn, self-righteous rigidity has nearly lost.... I have no right to stand silent: I owe it to you to express my views, whatever the consequences.
—1956 nationwide television broadcast
We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent upon its vulnerable reserve of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft. We cannot maintain it, half fortunate, half miserable, half confident, half despairing, half slave — to the ancient enemies of mankind — half free in the liberation of resources undreamed of until this day. No craft, no crew, can travel safely with such vast contradictions. On their resolutions depends the survival of us all.
—1965, Stevenson's last speech given to UN Economic and Social Council
February 5, 1944, in a report on war-torn Italy for Foreign Economic Administration, prefiguring the Marshall Plan, Stevenson observes that the ...United States has obvious long-range interests in developing the climate of enduring peace in Europe ...on a sound economic foundation.
—1944
February to April of 1960, Stevenson travels throughout Latin American and observes that, in a region rich in resources half the people are hungry, half don't sleep in beds, half are illiterate...if they don't achieve their desire for a better economic and political life, we may find enemies and not friends on our doorstep.
—1960
In America anyone can be President, that's one of the risks you take.
I am like the everlasting optimist who fell off a skyscraper. As he passed the twentieth floor, the horrified spectators in windows heard him shout, 'So far, so good.'
—1950
Eggheads* unite — you have nothing to lose but your yolks.
—1952
Stevenson playfully complained that several lawyers from his firm were leaving to work in the Kennedy administration, saying I regret that I have but one law firm to give to my country.
—1961
My friends, I have one point to make tonight. That's not many, but it is one more than is made in some political speeches — and that includes some I have delivered myself.
—1956
Stevenson liked to poke fun at Richard Nixon, vice president under Eisenhower. Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation.
—1956
It is not possible for this nation to be at once politically internationalist and economically isolationist. This is just as insane as asking one Siamese twin to high dive while the other plays piano.
—1952
I have been tempted to make a proposal to our Republican friends: that if they stop telling lies about us, we would stop telling the truth about them.
—1952
You know how it is in an election year. They pick a president and then for four years they pick on him.
—1952
I don't know why we complain so much about their broken campaign promises. It's those they keep that hurt.
—1955