Statesman Quotes - page 4
It is but natural that such a design should begin with George Washington, for with him begins that which is truly characteristic of America. He represents our independence, our Constitution, our liberty. He formed the highest aspirations that were entertained by any people into the permanent institutions of our Government. He stands as the foremost disciple of ordered liberty, a statesman with an inspired vision who is not outranked by any mortal greatness.
Calvin Coolidge
The foreboding statesman who knew how Greece had fallen asunder and perished, who knew the mean tenure of European leagues, who knew the absolute necessity of union and the jarring jealousies of sections, saw in the Constitution but a shadowy bond which foretold early separation and disaster. It was not strange when the Union was scarcely ten years old, still in the gristle, he heard the serpent of State sovereignty angrily hissing in the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions of '98.
George William Curtis
In 1850 Mr. Calhoun said, 'Let us be done with compromises. Let us go back and stand upon the Constitution'. Four years afterwards, the most Christian and most democratic statesman we have had in our history since Washington, Mr. Seward, accepted the challenge thrown out by Mr. Calhoun, solemnly saying, 'The sands of compromise are sliding from beneath my feet, and they are taking hold once more of the rock of the Constitution'.
George William Curtis
We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.
James Russell Lowell
The Baghdad regime is the first oil-producing government to opt for 100-per-cent nationalisation, a process completed with the acquisition of foreign assets in Basrah last December. It was the first to call for the use of oil as a political weapon against Israel and her backers. It gives strong economic and political support to the ‘Rejection Front' Palestinians who oppose Arafat's conciliation and are currently trying to outface the Syrians in Beirut. And it has a leader - Saddam Hussain - who has sprung from being an underground revolutionary gunman to perhaps the first visionary Arab statesman since Nasser.
Christopher Hitchens
For a philosophy based on faith is no longer philosophy. Perhaps it was this unresolved conflict which has prevented Western thought from ever coming to rest. Perhaps it is this conflict which is at the bottom of a kind of thought which is philosophic indeed but no longer Greek: modern philosophy. It is in trying to understand modern philosophy that we come across Machiavelli. Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of 'expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends-its end being the ag grandizement of one's country or fatherland-but also using the father land in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party.
Leo Strauss
We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. The deer strives with his supple legs, the cowman with trap and poison, the statesman with pen, the most of us with machines, votes, and dollars, but it all comes to the same thing: peace in our time. A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.
Aldo Leopold
This poet is now, most of the time, an elder statesman like Baruch or Smuts, full of complacent wisdom and cast-iron whimsy. But of course there was always a good deal of this in the official rôle that Frost created for himself; one imagines Yeats saying about Frost, as Sarah Bernhardt said about Nijinsky: "I fear, I greatly fear, that I have just seen the greatest actor in the world.”
Sometimes it is this public figure, this official rôle - the Only Genuine Robert Frost in Captivity - that writes the poems, and not the poet himself; and then one gets a self-made man's political editorials, full of cracker-box philosophizing, almanac joke-cracking - of a snake-oil salesman's mysticism; one gets the public figure's relishing consciousness of himself, an astonishing constriction of imagination and sympathy; one gets sentimentality and whimsicality; an arch complacency, a complacent archness; and one gets Homely Wisdom till the cows come home.
Randall Jarrell
