Adlai Stevenson

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

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

A free society is a place where it's safe to be unpopular.

We resent a philosophy of government that tells fairy tales in November and ghost stories in January.

Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.

A hypocrite is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump and make a speech for conservation.

Ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard.

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.

Adlai Stevenson, himself a notable speaker, often reminisced about his last meeting with Churchill. I asked him on whom or what he had based his oratorical style. Churchill replied, "It was an American statesman who inspired me and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ." Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockran's speeches of 60 years before. "He was my model," Churchill said. "I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall."

What a man knows at 50 that he did not know at 20 is, for the most part, incommunicable. The knowledge he has acquired with age is not the knowledge of formulas, or forms of words, but of people, places, actions - a knowledge gained not by words but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotion, love - the human experiences and emotions of this earth and of oneself and other men; and perhaps, too, a little faith, a little reverence for things one cannot see.