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

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
Strong
Legislature
Prevent
Single
Greatest
Virtue

More quotes by J. William Fulbright

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The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
J. William Fulbright
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We must care to think about the unthinkable things, because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
J. William Fulbright
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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.
J. William Fulbright
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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
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Our government will soon become what it is already a long way toward becoming, an elective dictatorship.
J. William Fulbright
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Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations
J. William Fulbright
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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.
J. William Fulbright
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The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust [our own] government statements.
J. William Fulbright
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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
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Israel controls the United States Senate.
J. William Fulbright
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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
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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.
J. William Fulbright
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It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people.
J. William Fulbright
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We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.
J. William Fulbright
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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
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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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....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
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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.
J. William Fulbright
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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.
J. William Fulbright
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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