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Home  »  Respectfully Quoted  »  Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1900–65)

Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.

 
NUMBER: 1343
AUTHOR: Adlai Ewing Stevenson (1900–65)
QUOTATION: If I were to attempt to put my political philosophy tonight into a single phrase, it would be this: Trust the people. Trust their good sense, their decency, their fortitude, their faith. Trust them with the facts. Trust them with the great decisions. And fix as our guiding star the passion to create a society where people can fulfill their own best selves—where no American is held down by race or color, by worldly condition or social status, from gaining what his character earns him as an American citizen, as a human being and as a child of God.
ATTRIBUTION: ADLAI E. STEVENSON, speech at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, September 13, 1956.—Stevenson, The New America, ed. Seymour E. Harris, Jr., pp. 13–14 (1971).
SUBJECTS: People