Top 91 Quotes & Sayings by J. William Fulbright - Page 2

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.

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.

To ask for overt renunciation of a cherished doctrine is to expect too much of human nature. Men do not repudiate the doctrines and dogmas to which they have sworn their loyalty. Instead they rationalize, revise, and re-interpret them to meet new needs and new circumstances, all the while protesting that their heresy is the purest orthodoxy.

Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.

One simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend.

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.

This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said: "Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other."

The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.

It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of ones voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.

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!

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 own failures.

The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life. It's the only activity that gives me some hope that the human race won't commit suicide, though I still wouldn't count on it.

"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.

The case for government by elites is irrefutable.

It is in a way a mystery that, instead of demanding that their governments give primary attention to their own needs and aspirations, most of the citizens of big counties-those, that is, that have the status of being "powers" in the world-far from being self-centered or materialistic as they are commonly credited with being, the ordinary citizen and his elected representative all too often turn out to be romantics, ready and eager to sacrifice programs of health, education and welfare for the power and pride of the nation.

We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.

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.

It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.

The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.

Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.

It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.

We would be deliberately violating the fundamental obligations we assumed in the Act of Bogota establishing the Organization of American States.

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.

During a single week of July 1967, 164 Americans were killed and 2100 were wounded in city riots in the United States. We are truly fighting a two-front war and doing badly in both. Each war feeds on the other and, although the President assures us that we have the resources to win both wars, in fact we are not winning either.

....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.

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.

Israel's shooting down of a civilian airplane and then the killing of 107 innocent peopel aboard, and their raid into neutral Lebanon are very dangerous developments. There's only one way I can see to stop it...is for the United States to take a very strong stand that this has to be settled...politically settled.

Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.

The Israelis object to an imposed settlement I don't know what they mean by an imposed settlement. It's quite obvious, without the all out support by the United States in money and weapons and so on the Israelis couldn't do what they've been doing. So we bear a very great share of the responsibility for the continuation of this...of this state of warfare.

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.

With respect to the creation of the program, I introduced the bill in September 1945, immediately after the end of the war with Japan, in August of that year. A number of considerations, of course, entered into my decision to introduce the bill, growing from my own experience as a Rhodes scholar and the experiences our government had had with the first Word War debts, [Herbert] Hoover's efforts in establishing the Belgian-American Education Foundation after World War I, [and] the Boxer Rebellion indemnity.