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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.
J. William Fulbright
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J. William Fulbright
Age: 89 †
Born: 1905
Born: April 9
Died: 1995
Died: February 9
Banker
Farmer
Former United States Senator
Instructor
Lawyer
Lecturer
Politician
President
Sumner
Missouri
James William Fulbright
William Fulbright
Honest
Expressed
Opinion
Price
High
Honestly
Something
Tend
Men
Atheism
Think
Americans
Thinking
Dangerous
Unanimity
Differences
Illegitimate
More quotes by J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
....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.
J. William Fulbright
It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.
J. William Fulbright
The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
J. William Fulbright
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
J. William Fulbright
Israel controls the United States Senate.
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.
J. William Fulbright
Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.
J. William Fulbright
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.
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.
J. William Fulbright
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!
J. William Fulbright
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.
J. William Fulbright