It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
Adlai Stevenson IRead
We mean by 'politics' the people's business - the most important business there is.
Interpretation
Politics is fundamentally about serving the needs and interests of the people.
In this quote, Adlai Stevenson emphasizes that politics is not merely a field of competition among elites, but rather it is the essential work of managing and addressing the concerns of the populace. He underscores the importance of political engagement as a vital component of society's welfare, asserting that the business of politics directly impacts people's lives and well-being.
In practice
This quote can be used in a political speech to emphasize the importance of civic engagement.
It is not the years in your life but the life in your years that counts.
The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.
There is a spiritual hunger in the world today - and it cannot be satisfied by better cars on longer credit terms.
Man is a strange animal. He generally cannot read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
The whole basis of the United Nations is the right of all nations - great or small - to have weight, to have a vote, to be attended to, to be a part of the twentieth century.
We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense. And the notion that this Nation is headed for defeat through deficit, or that strength is but a matter of slogans, is nothing but just plain nonsense.
Now more than ever the people are responsible for the character of their Congress. If that body be ignorant, reckless, and corrupt, it is because the people tolerate ignorance, recklessness, and corruption.
If the United States loses the economic weapons of control, it is very much weakened.
Government has a habit of blaming the private sector for its own failings while taking credit for advances we in fact owe to the private sector.
The right to vote is the easiest of all rights to grant.
I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations; but, on a candid examination of history, we shall find that turbulence, violence, and abuse of power, by the majority trampling on the rights of the minority, have produced factions and commotions, which, in republics, have, more frequently than any other cause, produced despotism.
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