John Foster Dulles Quotes

I wouldn't attach too much importance to these student riots. I remember when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasionally.

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.

In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of an external menace. This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero, nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of sacrifice. Once these exist, we have gone a long way on the path to war.

I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews.

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith.

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction.

Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace.

The principle of neutrality ... has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.

The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world. They would not tolerate compromise on goals, only on tactics.

Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor.

Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression.

We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face.

The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization.

The mark of a successful organization isn't whether or not it has problems, its whether it has the same problems it had last year.

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art ... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face ... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.

Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power.

Our institutions of freedom will not survive unless they are constantly replenished by the faith that gave them birth.