Leadership Quote by Adlai E. Stevenson

Stevenson’s line lands like a weary field report from democracy’s front lines: you can educate people and still lose them. “Ignorance” isn’t framed as a simple lack of information; it’s “stubborn,” a choice reinforced by pride, habit, and the comfort of certainty. “Prejudice,” meanwhile, isn’t treated as a mere bad opinion that evaporates under better facts. It’s “hard” in the physical sense - dense, set, structural. The phrasing suggests a political reality Stevenson knew intimately: public life isn’t a seminar where the best argument wins; it’s a contest against psychological defenses and social incentives.

The power here is the pairing. Ignorance feeds prejudice, and prejudice protects ignorance. That circularity is the subtext: persuasion fails when belief is performing another job - signaling belonging, protecting status, justifying fear. Stevenson doesn’t moralize with florid condemnation. He diagnoses, almost clinically, which is its own kind of moral pressure. If ignorance is stubborn and prejudice is hard, then the tools of politics have to be more than facts and speeches. They require time, relationships, institutions, and sometimes confrontation.

Context matters. Stevenson, the eloquent liberal standard-bearer of mid-century American Democratic politics, operated during early Cold War anxieties and the accelerating struggle over civil rights. In that terrain, misinformation wasn’t accidental and prejudice wasn’t private; both were mobilized. The sentence reads like a warning to idealists: progress isn’t blocked by a single villain so much as by ordinary people clinging to stories that make their world feel stable.