Great Socialist statesmen aren't made, they're still-born.
Many respected economists and statesmen believe our national debt is neither unwieldy nor a dangerous burden on the country. The trouble is that a vast majority of the American people think otherwise. . . . It violates basic American ideas of thrift and money management. These strong public feelings cannot be ignored forever.
It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.
That is Gladstone, the greatest statesman that ever lived. I intend to be a statesman, too.
The objects of this primary education. . . would be. . . to form the statesmen, legislators and judges, on whom public prosperity and individual happiness are so much to depend.
Statesman only talk of fate when they have blundered
Politicians all too often think about the next election. Statesmen think about the next generation.
Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone.
A statesman is a successful politician who is dead.
If we mean to have heroes, statesmen and philosophers, we should have learned women.
Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.
You know, a statesman is a dead politician.
The republic which sinks to sleep, trusting to constitutions and machinery, to politicians and statesmen, for the safety of its liberties, never will have any.
I always considered statesmen to be more expendable than soldiers.
A great statesman is he who knows when to depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them.
The British people, being subject to fogs, require grave statesmen.
These stupid peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.
We will go down in history either as the world's greatest statesmen or its worst villains.
Statesmen and beauties are very rarely sensible of the gradations of their decay.
