Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We can chart our future clearly and wisely only when we know the path which has led to the present.
The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.
That which seems the height of absurdity in one generation often becomes the height of wisdom in another.
If the Republicans will stop telling lies about the Democrats, we will stop telling the truth about them.
Bad administration, to be sure, can destroy good policy, but good administration can never save bad policy.
Men may be born free; they cannot be born wise; and it is the duty of the university to make the free wise.
Self-Criticism is the secret weapon of democracy, and candor and confession are good for the political soul.
Man is a strange animal, he doesn't like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
To act coolly, intelligently and prudently in perilous circumstances is the test of a man - and also a nation.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
After four years at the United Nations I sometimes yearn for the peace and tranquility of a political convention.
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.
Your public servants serve you right; indeed often they serve you better than your apathy and indifference deserve.
The best reason I can think of for not running for President of the United States is that you have to shave twice a day.
Why is it that when political ammunition runs low, inevitably the rusty artillery of abuse is always wheeled into action?
As citizens of this democracy, you are the rulers and the ruled, the law-givers and the law-abiding, the beginning and the end.
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 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.
I think that one of the most fundamental responsibilities is to give testimony in a court of law, to give it honestly and willingly.
A wise man does not try to hurry history. Many wars have been avoided by patience, and many have been precipitated by reckless haste.
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.
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.
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.
I have tried to talk about the issues in this campaign... and this has sometimes been a lonely road, because I never meet anybody coming the other way.
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.
Here, in the dread tribunal of last resort, valor contended against valor. Here brave men struggled and died for the right as God gave them to see the right.
If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is no barking dog to be tethered on a ten-foot chain.
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, to be a part of the twentieth century.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak, of anti-communism.
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.
[I]t is difficult to picture the great Creator conceiving of a program of one creature (which He has made) using another living creature for purposes of experimentation. There must be other, less cruel ways of obtaining knowledge.
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.
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.