Dirksen's Quotes

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Mary McGrory

#3. I love music. I seriously cannot wait until the day comes that I get to perform around the world for people, I've wanted to do that my whole life.

Keiynan Lonsdale

#4. Compared to Americans, Canadians are often more gentle in their approach to things. They're much more apologetic. There's less room for conflict.

Joseph Boyden

#5. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#13. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

#15. Right now he was having a hell of a time keeping the bear under control. He wanted to roar and tear Massimo limb from limb. He wanted to toss his lifeless body away from Cassie. "Stop the growling, Talen," Gerri snapped. "You scared her into fainting. There's something you don't see every day.

Milly Taiden

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#18. I've got quite a curvy shape so I try to wear stuff that's tailored.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor

#19. The stage crew usually had the job of approaching fans. Putting himself in close proximity to a hoard of screaming women wasn't his brightest idea. He knew from experience that the first appendage they grabbed for was not your arm, and they didn't grasp lightly.

Eden Summers

#20. EVERY DAY IS NEW WITH EACH DAWN.

Mb

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

Everett Dirksen

#22. 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

#23. I needed to carve out my own place and find out what I was going to do.

Rosanne Cash

#24. 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

#25. I have a little dictaphone and if a sound takes my fancy or if a lyric comes to me in the middle of the night I'll just record it there and then.

Barry Gibb

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#28. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

#30. Spring is a time to find out where you are, who you are, and move toward where you are going.

Penelope Trunk

#31. 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