Statesmen Quotes

The very name of a politician, a statesman, is sure to cause terror and hatred; it has always connected with it the ideas of treachery, cruelty, fraud, and tyranny…

A politician is a person with whose politics you don't agree; if you agree with him, he is a statesman.

… the most powerful weapon that we have our command to-day is public opinion. Statesmen quail before it and it could move mountains!

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.

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

A statesman who keeps his ear permanently glued to the ground will have neither elegance of posture nor flexibility of movement.

The difference between a politician and a statesman is: a politician thinks of the next election and a statesman thinks of the next generation.

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.

War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, / The lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

The nation needs a statesman who fears not to meet and who knows how to sway immense masses of the working classes.

The pressure of time, is the overwhelming challenge for policymakers who must act on assessments that cannot be proved at the time and whose mistakes are irretrievable.

Analysts can choose the problems that they want to study whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him.

True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what it is into what it ought to be.

A government of statesmen or of clerks? Of Humbug or of Humdrum?

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country; he should lisp the praise of liberty and of those illustrious heroes and statesmen who have wrought a revolution in her favor.

Patriotism must be faithful as well as fervent; statesmanship must be wise as well as fearless not the statesmanship which will command the applause of the hour, but the judgment of posterity.

The most brilliant statesman who ever lived, possessing the loftiest and keenest intellect of his time.

[Fidel] Castro was gifted leader who engineered social improvements that benefitted most Cubans, a statesman who placed Cuba at the center of world politics, and a masterful tactician who outlasted ten hostile U. S. Presidents…

Nature abhors a vacuum, even in the heads of statesmen.

There are some whom the applause of the multitude has deluded into the belief that they are really statesmen.

If there is not the occasion, you don't get the great statesmen. If Lincoln had lived in peacetime, you would not know his name today.

The true men of action in our time, those who transform the world, are not the politicians and statesmen, but the scientists.

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.

Now I know what a statesman is; he's a dead politician. We need more statesmen.