Top 100 Quotes About Statesmen
#1. We want to believe. Young students try to believe in older authors, constituents try to believe in their Congressmen, countries try to believe in their statesmen, but they can't. Too many voices, too much scattered, illogical ill-considered criticism.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#2. The poets, by which I mean all artists, are finally the only people that know the truth about us. Soldiers don't, statesmen don't, priests don't, union leaders don't ... only the poets.
James Baldwin
#3. While I still do a lot of horror, it doesn't feel to me like I'm repeating myself. I like to stay interested. I'm kind of turning into one of those elder statesmen, like a Vincent Price or a Donald Pleasence. I like to think of myself alongside those guys.
Robert Englund
#4. Austrian public-opinion pollsters recently reported that those held in highest esteem by most of the people interviewed are neither the great artists nor the great scientists, neither the great statesmen nor the great sport figures, but those who master a hard lot with their heads held high.
Viktor E. Frankl
#5. Neither these statesmen nor their constituents sought in any way to use the Government for the interest of themselves or their section, or for the injury of a single member of the Confederacy.
Robert Toombs
#6. There are too many politicians in the world and too few statesmen.
Adi Godrej
#7. The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and plant corn - all serve as proudly, and as profitably, for America as the statesmen who draft treaties and the legislators who enact laws.
George Washington
#8. Hemispheric solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.
Aldo Leopold
#9. All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State.
Edwin A. Abbott
#10. The greatest statesmen, philosophers, humanitarians ... have not been able to put an end to war. Why place that demand on photography?
James Nachtwey
#11. In all ages statesmen have found it hard to understand the psychology of revolutionary governments bound to the wheel of armaments and debts. For it is a cycle that cannot be reversed. It can only be broken or its pace accelerated.
Arthur Bryant
#12. On the Left, on the Right, in the Middle; Authors, statesmen, thieves; so-called humanists and self-declared fascists; the adventurous and the contemplative, in every realm of male expression and action, violence is experienced and articulated as love and freedom.
Andrea Dworkin
#13. The prosperity of commerce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political cares.
Alexander Hamilton
#14. An insular country, subject to fogs, and with a powerful middle class, requires grave statesmen.
Benjamin Disraeli
#16. And when statesmen or others worry him [the scientist] too much, then he should leave with his possessions. With a firm and steadfast mind one should hold under all conditions, that everywhere the earth is below and the sky above and to the energetic man, every region is his fatherland.
Tycho Brahe
#17. Nature has cast but two men in the mould of statesmen,
myself and Mirabeau. After that she broke the mould.
Georges Danton
#18. There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.
Plato
#19. If the attainment of peace is the ultimate objective of all statesmen, it is, at the same time, something very ordinary, closely tied to the daily life of each individual.
Eisaku Sato
#20. My early years abroad were spent mainly upon the European Continent, and public duties since have led me to make prolonged stays in various Continental states France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Russia where the study of Continental statesmen has been almost forced upon me.
Andrew Dickson White
#21. Why is war such an easy option? Why does peace remain such an elusive goal? We know statesmen skilled at waging war, but where are those dedicated enough to humanity to find a way to avoid war
Elie Wiesel
#22. One of the great creative statesmen of our age was Franklin Roosevelt. He was creative precisely because he preferred experiment to ideology.
Robert Kennedy
#23. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality',than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed
R.D. Laing
#24. PATRIOT, n. One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors.
Ambrose Bierce
#25. Responsible statesmen have only one choice - to do everything possible to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. Any other position is short-sighted; more so, it is suicidal.
Yuri Andropov
#26. The German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, was one of the few authentic geniuses among nineteenth-century statesmen.
Niall Ferguson
#27. Statesmen exhibit five key commitments: 1) A commitment to principles above politics; 2) An ability to compromise without abandoning principle; 3) A commitment to truth over spin; 4) A commitment to courage over cowardice; and 5) A commitment, or willingness, to give up power.
Tom Coburn
#28. The inspiration of a single book has made preachers, poets, philosophers, authors, and statesmen. On the other hand, the demoralization of a single book has sometimes made infidels, profligates, and criminals.
Orison Swett Marden
#29. To them belong, not only the truly great statesmen, but all other great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great stands Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#30. It is not given to princes, statesmen and captains to pierce the mysteries of the future, and even the most penetrating gaze reaches only conclusions which, however seemingly vindicated at a given moment, are inexorably effaced by time.
Winston Churchill
#31. Commercial concerns have expanded from family business to corporate wealth which is self-perpetuating and which enlightened statesmen and economists now dread as the most potent oligarchy yet produced.
Helen Keller
#32. The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists
W. H. Auden
#33. The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
Benjamin Disraeli
#34. We need not take refuge in supernatural gods to explain our saints and sages and heroes and statesmen, as if to explain our disbelief that mere unaided human beings could be that good or wise.
Abraham H. Maslow
#35. We are much too tolerant of the moral aberration of statesmen and bureaucrats.
Kenzaburo Oe
#36. Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.
Woodrow Wilson
#37. When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.
Robert Bolt
#38. There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right.
Walter Isaacson
#39. Letter writing was clearly important to Reagan. Even as president he kept dashing off letters to friends, pen pals, media people, statesmen, critics, and the kind of people who write to presidents never expecting a reply.
Russell Baker
#40. I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.
Harry S. Truman
#41. One of our statesmen said, "The curse of this country is eloquent men."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#42. The president said nothing about the views of government in regard to the possibility of Carolinas seceding. This however was frequently spoken of by other statesmen at the North. I think they were unanimous in this, that no army would be sent here.
John Bachman
#43. Self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril.
Woodrow Wilson
#44. It seems to me, that if statesmen had a little more arithmetic, or were accustomed to calculation, wars would be much less frequent.
Benjamin Franklin
#45. No nation went into oblivion or was destroyed because it had bad laws, or because its statesmen were not intelligent, but because of INTERNAL CORRUPTION, and because they could not maintain the POWER OF SELF-CONTROL.
Melvin J. Ballard
#46. Society gained more by not placing excessive power in the hands of mediocre politicians than it lost by limiting the power of great heroes and statesmen who might or might not appear once every few centuries.
Yoshiki Tanaka
#47. Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen.
T. S. Eliot
#48. Journalists are in the same madly rocking boat as diplomats and statesmen. Like them, when the Cold War ended, they looked for a new world order and found a new world disorder. If making and conducting foreign policy in today's turbulent environment is difficult, so is practicing journalism.
Henry Grunwald
#49. Certain it is that a great responsibility rests upon the statesmen of all nations, not only to fulfill the promises for reduction in armaments, but to maintain the confidence of the people of the world in the hope of an enduring peace.
Frank B. Kellogg
#51. It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.
Charles Caleb Colton
#52. When any body of statesmen make public asservations by one or various voices, that there is no discord among them, not a dissentient voice on any subject, people are apt to suppose that they cannot hang together much longer.
Anthony Trollope
#53. Repetita iuvant. Italy, a land of great saints, poets, sailors, artists, statesmen, businessmen, lawyers, intellectuals, professors, journalists, whores, gangsters, religious parasites and dickheads.
William C. Brown
#54. Especially when there are difficulties in our relations, parties and statesmen in China and Japan should look over the situation from a higher point of view and preserve the political foundation of bilateral ties.
Wu Bangguo
#55. History is no longer just a chronicle of kings and statesmen, of people who wielded power, but of ordinary women and men engaged in manifold tasks. Women's history is an assertion that women have a history.
Toshiko Kishida
#56. Compromise used to mean that half a loaf was better than no bread. Among modern statesmen it really seems to mean that half a loaf; is better than a whole loaf.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#57. Statesmen think in terms of history and view society as an organism. Prophets are different since they believe absolute aims can be achieved in the foreseeable future. More people have been killed by crusaders than by statesmen.
Henry A. Kissinger
#58. businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen and "thought in continents,
Hannah Arendt
#59. I have always been thankful that so many of our country's greatest leaders and statesmen were able to be on this earth at the same time and place to draft the Constitution.
Bob Latta
#60. Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path.
Pat Buchanan
#62. The chickadee and nuthatch are more inspiring society than statesmen and philosophers, and we shall return to these last as to more vulgar companions.
Henry David Thoreau
#63. The British people, being subject to fogs, require grave statesmen.
Benjamin Disraeli
#64. I'm always concerned that I'm insulting the elder statesmen on the set by my crass behavior.
Heather Langenkamp
#65. We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground - for we have all been babies.
Mark Twain
#66. An astronomer must be cosmopolitan, because ignorant statesmen cannot be expected to value their services
Tycho Brahe
#67. Society always consists, in greatest part, of young and foolish persons. The old, who have seen through the hypocrisy of the courts and statesmen, die, and leave no wisdom to their sons. They believe their own newspaper, as their fathers did at their age.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#68. The great events of history are often due to secular changes in the growth of population and other fundamental economic causes, which, escaping by their gradual character the notice of contemporary observers, are attributed to the follies of statesmen or the fanaticism of atheists .
John Maynard Keynes
#69. For if the Germans do not help defend the West, American and Canadian troops must cross the seas to do the job, and I venture to believe that the troops - if not the statesmen - regard this as an interference at least in their own domestic affairs.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
#70. Re-examining our reasoning is not something that has come naturally to American statesmen.
Samantha Power
#71. He [Paolo Sarpi] was one of the two foremost Italian statesmen since the Middle Ages, the other being Cavour .
Andrew Dickson White
#72. Zealous statesmen perhaps did more mischief than anything in the Galaxy--with the possible exception of procrastinating soldiers. That could indicate the fundamental difference between statecraft and war.
H. Beam Piper
#73. We were thus led to organize ourselves, as men who had fought the war together, in order to support those statesmen who had truly understood the lessons of that World War, thus attempting to prevent its recurrence.
Rene Cassin
#74. At present the peace of the world has been preserved, not by statesmen, but by capitalists.
Benjamin Disraeli
#75. We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time,or as the greatest criminals
Joseph Goebbels
#76. And the annual meetings of the League's Assembly are in effect official peace congresses binding on the participating states to an extent that most statesmen a quarter of a century ago would have regarded as utopian.
Hjalmar Branting
#77. And statesmen at her council met Who knew the seasons, when to take Occasion by the hand, and make The bounds of freedom wider yet.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#78. In order to save the forty million inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, our colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population of this country, to provide new markets ... The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question.
Cecil Rhodes
#79. It may be interesting to note how many statesmen there are who believe that the cost of living can be reduced by making the people of other countries help to feed and clothe us.
Charles Lindbergh
#81. Midas, they say, possessed the art of old; Of turning whatsoe'er he touch'd to gold; This modern statesmen can reverse with ease - Touch them with gold, they'll turn to what you please.
John Wolcot
#82. To this group belong not only the genuinely great statesmen but all the great reformers as well. Beside Frederick the Great we have men such as Martin Luther and Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler
#83. Opportunity, to statesmen, is as the just degree of heat to chemists; it perfects all the work.
John Suckling
#84. One or two of these scoundrel statesmen should be shot once a-year, just to keep the others on their good behavior.
Walter Scott
#85. Those great and glorious actions that dazzle our eyes with their luster are represented by statesmen as the result of great wisdomand excellent design; whereas, in truth, they are commonly the effects of the humors and passions.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#86. The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities
Mark Twain
#87. In history-as-politics, the 'future' is that vacuum in time waiting to be filled with the antics of statesmen.
Edward Abbey
#88. The statesmen still say that we should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations and yet it is not possible any longer not to interfere, even when we do not mean to do so.
Arthur Hays Sulzberger
#89. The theologians,
the apologists, and their kin the metaphysicians, the high-handed
statesmen, and others, no longer interest me. All that has been spoilt for
me by the grind of stern reality!
Thomas Hardy
#90. So long as we have more politicians than statesmen, we shall have problems.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#91. In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.
Jean Baudrillard
#92. Clergymen, judges, statesmen
the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day
stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#93. Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.
Woodrow Wilson
#94. A nation may be moved by its statesmen and defined by its military but it's usually remembered for its artists.
John Steinbeck
#95. Statesmen can strive for the universal values of justice, fairness, and tolerance, but only so far as they do not interfere with the quest for power, which to him is synonymous with survival.
Robert D. Kaplan
#96. Those who see and observe kings, heroes, and statesmen, discover that they have headaches, indigestion, humors and passions, just like other people; every one of which in their turns determine their wills in defiance of their reason.
Lord Chesterfield
#97. The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.
Howard Zinn
#98. Not only is [a mother] entrusted with the guardianship of the intellect and character of the world's statesmen and philosophers, but her gentle presence, as she bends over the cradle, and the silent influence of her daily life are shaping the entire moral character of the coming generation.
C.E. Sargent
#100. Let us leave the cure of public evils to those quacks, the statesmen.
Honore De Balzac
