#Statesmanship Quotes

“We need to be strong in order to avoid war; and to win. A politician looks forward only to the next election. A statesman looks forward to the next generation. Any person who is over 30 and is not a conservative, has no brains.”

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

“The legislator must be in advance of his age.Across the mind of the statesman flash ever and anon the brilliant, though partial, intimations of future events.... Something which is more than fore-sight and less than prophetic knowledge marks the statesman a peculiar being among his contemporaries.”

“Your real statesman is first of all, and chief of all, a great human being, with an eye for all the great fields on which men likehimself struggle, with unflagging, pathetic hope, toward better things.... He is a guide, a counselor, a mentor, a servant, a friend of mankind.”

“Statesmen have to bend to the collective will of their peoples or be broken.”

“Great statesmen seem to direct and rule by a sort of power to put themselves in the place of the nation over which they are set, and may thus be said to possess the souls of poets at the same time they display the coarser sense and the more vulgar sagacity of practical men of business.”

“When everybody has got money they cut taxes, and when they're broke they raise them. That's statesmanship of the highest order.”

“A statesman is an easy man, he tells his lies by rote.A journalist invents his lies, and rams them down your throat.So stay at home and drink your beer and let the neighbors vote.”

“...to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

“The challenge of statesmanship is to have the vision to dream of a better, safer world and the courage, persistence, and patience to turn that dream into reality.”

“In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.”

“Whether at home or abroad, the task of statesman is to work with human nature warts and all, and to draw on instincts and even prejudices that can be turned to good purpose. It is never to try to recreate Mankind in a new image.”