Dirksen Quotes

#1. [On Senator Everett Dirksen:] His great enemy was boredom and he won every engagement.

Mary McGrory

#2. Over the years, he [Everett Dirksen] developed a style of infinitely subtle fustian, whose effect can still be remotely approximated by sipping twelve-year-old bourbon, straight, while reading Dickens aloud, in a sort of sepulchral purr.

Lance Morrow

#3. Dirksen's Three Laws of Politics: 1. Get elected. 2. Get re-elected. 3. Don't get mad, get even.

Everett Dirksen

#4. I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times.

Everett Dirksen

#5. Nothing is so sad as the injustices of old age.

Beryl Bainbridge

#6. During a political campaign everyone is concerned with what a candidate will do on this or that question if he is elected except the candidate; he's too busy wondering what he'll do if he isn't elected.

Everett Dirksen

#7. We are becoming so accustomed to millions and billions of dollars that 'thousands' has almost passed out of the dictionary.

Everett Dirksen

#8. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money.

Everett Dirksen

#9. We were spending American blood and treasure to liberate the people of Afghanistan from one of the most brutal regimes on the face of the earth. That we would not use that moment to press for women's rights seems to me unthinkable.

Condoleezza Rice

#10. When all is said and done, the real citadel of strength of any community is in the hearts and minds and desires of those who dwell there.

Everett Dirksen

#11. We have been through this is biennial convulsion four or five different times over the past 10 or 12 years, and now it appears that we are going through this quiet agony all over again.

Everett Dirksen

#12. I am a man of principles, and my first principle is flexibility.

Everett Dirksen

#13. Love yourself for who you are. You are beautiful inside and out, and nobody can take that away from you.

Christina Milian

#14. When a member of the House moves over to the Senate, he raises the IQ of both bodies.

Everett Dirksen

#15. Life is not a static thing. The only people who do not change their minds are incompetents in asylums, and those in cemeteries.

Everett Dirksen

#16. leave. I learned I would be going to jail no matter what and that my confession had helped to ensure it would be for much longer than if I had followed my lawyer's simple instructions and said nothing.

Cleary Wolters

#17. I try to walk around with a smile on my face.

Johnny Damon

#18. What is one thing today becomes quite another thing tomorrow.

Alexander McCall Smith

#19. Indie rock is very healthy, there's a lot of diversity and a lot of creativity, but it does not have the revolutionary spirit of the late-70s punk scene in regards to design and politics and fashion and stuff like that.

Bruce Pavitt

#20. We thought that the Internet was going to connect us all together. As a young geek in rural Maine, I got excited about the Internet because it seemed that I could be connected to the world. What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves.

Eli Pariser

#21. The oil can is mightier than the sword.

Everett Dirksen

#22. The mind is no match with the heart in persuasion; constitutionality is no match with compassion.

Everett Dirksen

#23. And the stately lilies stand Fair in the silvery light, Like saintly vestals, pale in prayer; Their pure breath sanctifies the air, As its fragrance fills the night.

Julia Caroline Dorr

#24. The U.S. Senate - an old scow which doesn't move very fast, but never sinks.

Everett Dirksen

#25. I have said, with respect to authorization bills, that I do not want the Congress or the country to commit fiscal suicide on the installment plan.

Everett Dirksen

#26. But the basic difficulty still remains: It is the expansion of Federal power, about which I wish to express my alarm. How easily we embrace such business.

Everett Dirksen

#27. When I feel the heat, I see the light.

Everett Dirksen

#28. There is no force so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

Everett Dirksen

#29. Whatever the color of a man's skin, we are all mankind. So every denial of freedom, of equal opportunity for a livelihood, or for an education, diminishes me.

Everett Dirksen

#30. The church is like Noah's ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you'll drown.

Shane Claiborne

#31. I am a man of principle, and one of my basic principles is flexibility.

Everett Dirksen

#32. Stronger than all the armies is an idea thats time has come ... The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment. It will not be stayed or denied. It is here!

Everett Dirksen