J. William Fulbright Quotes

The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another.

The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.

The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order ... It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.

The legislator is an indispensable guardian of our freedom. It is true that great executives have played a powerful role in the development of civilization, but such leaders appear sporadically, by chance. They do not always appear when they are most needed. The great executives have given inspiration and push to the advancement of human society, but it is the legislator who has given stability and continuity to that slow and painful progress.

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.

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.

The true mark of greatness is not stridency but magnanimity.

Education is a slow moving but powerful force

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

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 ...

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.

There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.

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.

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.

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations.

To be a statesman, you must first get elected.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes.

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.

Of all the joint ventures in which we might engage, the most productive, in my view, is educational exchange. I have always had great difficulty-since the initiation of the Fulbright scholarships in 1946-in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign-policy activities.

We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations

"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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.

The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.

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.

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 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.

Corollary to acknowledging the political purposes of foreign aid is a clear recognition of the fact that a meaningful and effective aid program, far from avoiding intervention in the affairs of the recipient, in fact constitutes intervention of a most profound character. Its purposes is nothing less than the reshaping of a society, of its internal life and, in less obvious ways, of its relations with the outside world. Indeed the determinant of our aid - of whether or not we extend it and whether or not a country will wish to have it - must be the kind of internal changes it can be expected to bring about and the effect which these changes will have on the interests of both the donor and the recipient.
The question, therefore, is not one of intervention or nonintervention per se but of the ends and means of intervention.

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.

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.