Quotes from J. William Fulbright

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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'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.

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.

What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact.

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

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

Education is a slow moving but powerful force

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.

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.

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.

The attitude above all others which I feel sure is no longer valid is the arrogance of power, the tendency of great nations to equate power with virtue and major responsibilities with a universal mission.

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

A policy that can be accurately, though perhaps not prudently, defined as one of "peaceful coexistence."

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. It has no apparatus to deal with the boor, the liar, the lout, and the antidemocrat in general.

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.

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.