Dean Acheson Quotes
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A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
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President Truman used to say that budget figures revealed far more of proposed policy than speeches.
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Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up.
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How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.
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Unfortunately, the hyperbole of the inaugural outran the provisions of the budget.
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It is worse than immoral, it's a mistake.
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The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.
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The great corrupter of public man is the ego. Looking at the mirror distracts one's attention from the problem.
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'The conclusion was...unpalatable to believers in American omnipotence, to whom every goal unattained is explicable only by incompetence or treason.'
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Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.
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I am willing to join in your statement on the ground that I feel about the future of the United States whenever the President starts out on his travels the way the Marshal of the Supreme Court does when he opens a session of that Court. You will recall that he ends up his liturgy by saying 'God save the United States for the Court is now sitting.
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'If I have said nothing new tonight, it may well be because, in a family of nations as in families of individuals we should expect nothing more sensational than growth.'
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'Force can overcome force, but a free society cannot long steel itself to dominate another people by sheer force.'
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'The position of the United States had undergone a drastic change; the purpose and capabilities of the State Department had not.'
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We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.
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'I was a frustrated schoolteacher, persisting against overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the belief that the human mind could be moved by facts and reason.'
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'The simple truth is that perseverance in good policies is the only avenue to success...'
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On the France's Indochina involvement: 'They were engaged in the most dangerous of all activities – deceiving themselves...France was engaged in a task beyond her strength, indeed, beyond the strength of any external power unless it was acting in support of the dominant local will and purpose.'
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'It is a mistake to interpret too literally and sweepingly the poet's admonition that things are not what they seem. Sometimes they are, and it is often essential to survival to know when they are and when they are not.'
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I must plead guilty as any of escaping into immediate busywork to keep from the far harder task of peering into a dim future, which, of course, should be one of a diplomat's main duties.
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'The test for aid to poor nations is therefore whether it makes them capable of being productive. If it fails to do so, it is likely to make them even poorer in the – not so very – long run.'
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'The best environment for diplomacy is found where mutual confidence between governments exists...'
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'The qualities which produce the dogged, unbeatable courage of the British, personified at the time by Winston Churchill, can appear in other settings as stubbornness bordering on stupidity.'
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If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.