Top 60 William Fulbright Quotes
#1. The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.
J. William Fulbright
#2. I do not think it is "selling America short" when we ask a great deal of her; on the contrary, it is those who ask nothing, those who see no fault, who are really selling America short!
J. William Fulbright
#3. The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening.
J. William Fulbright
#4. Naturepitiless in a pitiless universeis certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands.
J. William Fulbright
#5. Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.
J. William Fulbright
#6. The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life.
J. William Fulbright
#7. Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations
J. William Fulbright
#8. To give [the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba] even covert support is on a par with the hypocrisy and cynicism for which the United States is constantly denouncing the Soviet Union in the United Nations and elsewhere. This point will not be lost on the rest of the world, nor on our own consciences.
J. William Fulbright
#9. We would be deliberately violating the fundamental obligations we assumed in the Act of Bogota establishing the Organization of American States.
J. William Fulbright
#10. We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes.
J. William Fulbright
#11. In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another.
J. William Fulbright
#12. Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.
J. William Fulbright
#13. In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest.
J. William Fulbright
#14. Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations.
J. William Fulbright
#15. We must dare to think 'unthinkable' thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world.
J. William Fulbright
#16. The great majority of the Senate of the United States ... somewhere around 80 percent ... are completely in support of Israel, anything Israel wants. This has been demonstrated time and again, and this has made it difficult.
J. William Fulbright
#17. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable.
J. William Fulbright
#18. One simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian ... one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend.
J. William Fulbright
#19. What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.
J. William Fulbright
#20. We are trying to remake Vietnamese society, a task which certainly cannot be accomplished by force and which probably cannot be accomplished by any means available to outsiders.
J. William Fulbright
#22. The cause of our difficulties in southeast Asia is not a deficiency of power but an excess of the wrong kind of power which results in a feeling of impotence when it fails to achieve its desired ends.
J. William Fulbright
#23. Man's struggle to be rational about himself, about his relationship to his own society and to other peoples and nations involves a constant search for understanding among all peoples and all cultures-a search that can only be effective when learning is pursued on a worldwide basis.
J. William Fulbright
#24. There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.
J. William Fulbright
#25. Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.
J. William Fulbright
#26. Power tends to confuse itself with virtue, and a great nation is peculiarly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God's favor.
J. William Fulbright
#27. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.
J. William Fulbright
#28. "The making of peace is a continuing process that must go on from day to day, from year to year, so long as our civilization shall last."
J. William Fulbright
#29. Finally, the Program aims, through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.
J. William Fulbright
#30. There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world.
J. William Fulbright
#31. Some new machinery with adequate powers must be created now if our fine phrases and noble sentiments are to have substance and meaning for our children.
J. William Fulbright
#32. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations.
J. William Fulbright
#33. When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled.
J. William Fulbright
#34. I do not question the power of our weapons and the efficiency of our logistics; I cannot say these things delight me as they seem to delight some of our officials, but they are certainly impressive.
J. William Fulbright
#36. The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.
J. William Fulbright
#37. The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
J. William Fulbright
#38. It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.
J. William Fulbright
#39. The rapprochement of peoples is only possible when differences of culture and outlook are respected and appreciated rather than feared and condemned, when the common bond of human dignity is recognized as the essential bond for a peaceful world.
J. William Fulbright
#40. A nation's budget is full of moral implications; it tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about; it tells what its values are.
J. William Fulbright
#41. We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.
J. William Fulbright
#42. To criticize one's country is to do it a service ... Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism-a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.
J. William Fulbright
#43. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God's work.
J. William Fulbright
#44. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.
J. William Fulbright
#45. In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.
J. William Fulbright
#48. The Soviet Union has indeed been our greatest menace, not so much because of what it has done, but because of the excuses it has provided us for our failures.
J. William Fulbright
#49. I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion honestly expressed by honest men.
J. William Fulbright
#50. We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
J. William Fulbright
#51. Insofar as it represents a genuine reconciliation of differences, a consensus is a fine thing; insofar as it represents a concealment of differences, it is a miscarriage of democratic procedure.
J. William Fulbright
#52. The Program further aims to make the benefits of American culture and technology available to the world and to enrich American life by exposing it to the science and art of many societies.
J. William Fulbright
#53. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations.
J. William Fulbright
#54. I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant.
J. William Fulbright
#55. There has been a strong tradition in this country that it is not the function of the military to educate the public on political issues.
J. William Fulbright
#56. It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people.
J. William Fulbright
#59. Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.
J. William Fulbright
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