American Statesman Quotes & Sayings

A virtuoso performance. Scott Thompson's biography of the soldier statesman Fidel V. Ramos illustrates the fascinating and complex geography of Filipino politics and its relation with the American hegemon. It's first-rate scholarship and equally first-rate writing. — F. Sionil Jose

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something - give you something! - and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get! — Sinclair Lewis

Adlai Stevenson, himself a notable speaker, often reminisced about his last meeting with Churchill. I asked him on whom or what he had based his oratorical style. Churchill replied, "It was an American statesman who inspired me and taught me how to use every note of the human voice like an organ." Winston then to my amazement started to quote long excerpts from Bourke Cockran's speeches of 60 years before. "He was my model," Churchill said. "I learned from him how to hold thousands in thrall." — William Bourke Cockran

The comparison might strike you as farfetched. What (you might be asking) can a Broadway musical possibly add to the legacy of a Founding Father--a giant of our national life, a war hero, a scholar, a statesman? What's one little play, or even one very big play, next to all that?
But there is more than one way to change the world . To secure their freedom, the polyglot American colonists had to come together, and stick together, in the face of enormous adversity. To live in a new way, they first had to think and feel in a new way. It took guns and ships to win the American Revolution, but it also required pamphlets and speeches--and at least one play. — Jeremy McCarter

Tolstoy went on to observe,"This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.
"Washington was a typical American. Naopoleon was a typical Frenchmen, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country
bigger than all the Presidents t,ogether. We are still too near to his greatness, " Tolstoy concluded, "but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and too powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when it's light beams directly on us. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

You can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency. — Wendell Phillips

In our country and in our times no man is worthy the honored name of statesman who does not include the highest practicable education of the people in all his plans of administration. He may have eloquence, he may have a knowledge of all history, diplomacy, jurisprudence; and by these he might claim, in other countries, the elevated rank of a statesman: but unless he speaks, plans, labors, at all times and in all places, for the culture and edification of the whole people, he is not, he cannot be, an American statesman. — Horace Mann

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman. — Eugene Jarecki

Henry Kissinger is perhaps the best-known American statesman of the 20th century. — Saul David

[T]he great American statesman devotes his energy, ability, and wisdom to conforming himself and this people to the moral principles that gave this nation birth, are older than anything else in the country's soul, and yet retain the power to make us young again with the vigor of virtue and the zeal for justice. — Alan Keyes