21 quotes
Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.
The Arrogance of Power (1966)
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste, but its effect, ...
The Arrogance of Power (1966)
The true mark of greatness is not stridency but magnanimity.
The Arrogance of Power (1966)
The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.
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.
Fanaticism is not a characteristic of mature societies but of unstable and politically primitive societies. Nor is it an expression of strength and self-confidence.
The operation was wildly out of proportion to the threat. It would compromise our moral position in the world and make it impossible for us to protest treaty violations by the Communists.
The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high.
The Price of Empire (1967)
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.
In Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963)
The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.
Nature—pitiless in a pitiless universe—is 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.
We would be deliberately violating the fundamental obligations we assumed in the Act of Bogota establishing the Organization of American States.
This, I believe, is the core of the democratic spirit. When we acknowledge our own fallibility, tolerance and compromise become possible and fanaticism becomes absurd.
The American Character (1963)
In these ways the war in Vietnam is poisoning and brutalizing our domestic life. Psychological incompatibility has proven to be more controlling than financial feasibility, and the Great Society has become a sick society.
The Price of Empire (1967)
A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because 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.
The Arrogance of Power (1966)
To give this activity even covert support is of a piece 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.
There are two Americas. One is the America of Lincoln and Adlai Stevenson; the other is the America of Teddy Roosevelt and the modern superpatriots. One is generous and humane, the other narrowly egotistical; one is self-critical, the other self-righteous; one is sensible, the other romantic; one is good-humored, the other solemn; one is inquiring, the other pontificating; one is moderate, the other filled with passionate intensity; one is judicious and the other arrogant in the use of great power.
The Arrogance of Power (1966)
It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.
The values upon which our system is built...imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.
When "freedom" is worshipped as a sublime and mystical state rather than as simply a necessary condition for human fulfillment, the faith in freedom itself ceases to express the democratic spirit and becomes something quite different; it ceases to express the conscience of a conservative and becomes instead the faith of a fanatic.