Everett Dirksen Quotes

#1. 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

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

Mary McGrory

#3. I learned that as much as you think when you're walking down that aisle that this forever, sometimes it's just not forever. You can have the best of intentions.

Betty Wright

#4. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#11. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

#13. I remember where I come from. I just see myself as someone who gets up and does what she loves every day - I'm not better or worse than anybody.

Kate DeAraugo

#14. You must go through a winter to understand.

Ken Kesey

#15. The best method for preventing destructive cult involvement is preventative education. If students and the public at large are more aware of destructive groups beforehand they may better understand and resist their recruitment efforts.

Rick Ross

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

Everett Dirksen

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

#22. ABC forbids political activity by journalists.

Bill Dedman

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

Everett Dirksen

#24. 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

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

Everett Dirksen

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

Everett Dirksen

#27. 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