J. William Fulbright Quotes
-
Israel controls the United States Senate.
→ -
The greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.
→ -
Education is a slow moving but powerful force
→ -
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!
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Well, we have the leverage in the sense that we supply all the wherewithal...or a major part of the wherewithal to finance or to pay for everything Israel does. We don't have any leverage in the sense that Israel controls the Senate. The Senate is at least...a subservient, in my opinion, much too much. We should be more concerned about the United States' interest, rather than doing the bidding of Israel. This is a most unusual development.
→ -
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.
→ -
"Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.
→ -
We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
→ -
Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.
→ -
Education is the best means-probably the only means-by which nations can cultivate a degree of objectivity about each other's behavior and intentions. It is the means by which Russians and Americans can come to understand each others' aspirations for peace and how the satisfactions of everyday life may be achieved.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
To be a statesman, you must first get elected.
→ -
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.
→ -
Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.
→ -
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.
→ -
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 price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
→ -
As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
"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."
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→
J. William Fulbright
- Born: April 9, 1905
- Died: February 9, 1995
- Occupation: Former United States Senator
Related Authors
-
Mike Mansfield Former member of the U.S. Senate -
Irving Kristol Columnist -
Barry Goldwater Former United States Senator -
Dale Bumpers Former Governor of Arkansas -
-
Richard M. Nixon 37th U.S. President -
Strom Thurmond Former United States Senator -
Vic Snyder Former U.S. Representative -
Lyndon B. Johnson 36th U.S. President -
Leon Jaworski Special prosecutor -
William Westmoreland Military Commander -
Eugene McCarthy Former United States Senator -
Everett Dirksen Former U.S. Senator -
Sean Penn Actor -
Robert McNamara Former United States Secretary of Defense -
Dean Rusk Former United States Secretary of State -
William J. Clinton 42nd U.S. President -
Hubert H. Humphrey Former Vice President of the United States -
Robert Byrd Former United States Senator -
