Great Throughts Treasury

"Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is a temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship." - James Russell Lowell

"Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak." - Walter Lippmann

"The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence." -

"It is an easy matter, requiring little thought, generosity or statesmanship to push a weak man down when he is struggling to get up. Anyone can do that. Greatness, generosity, statesmanship are shown in stimulating, encouraging every individual in the body politic to make of himself the most useful, intelligent and patriotic citizen possible." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington

"True statesmanship is the art of changing a nation from what is into what it ought to be." - William Rounseville Alger

"I consider even a victorious war as an evil, from which statesmanship must endeavor to spare nations." - Otto von Bismarck, Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg

"We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep." - Queen Elizabeth II, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary NULL

"I stand for the square deal. But when I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having those rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. One word of warning, which, I think, is hardly necessary in Kansas. When I say I want a square deal for the poor man, I do not mean that I want a square deal for the man who remains poor because he has not got the energy to work for himself. If a man who has had a chance will not make good, then he has got to quit. And you men of the Grand Army, you want justice for the brave man who fought, and punishment for the coward who shirked his work. Is that not so?" - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Poverty is a bitter thing; but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness, to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all vain pursuits—the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey." - Walter Lippmann

"The people are the roots of a nation, and the roots should be strong so as to create a peaceful nation." - Sejong the Great, aka King Sejong, family name Yi, given name Do NULL

"What were once only hopes for the future have now come to pass; it is almost exactly 13 years since the overwhelming majority of people in Ireland and Northern Ireland voted in favor of the agreement signed on Good Friday 1998, paving the way for Northern Ireland to become the exciting and inspirational place that it is today." - Elizabeth II, born Elizabeth Alexandra May NULL