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A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
Dean Acheson -
President Truman used to say that budget figures revealed far more of proposed policy than speeches.
Dean Acheson
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Washington is like a self-sealing tank on a military aircraft. When a bullet passes through, it closes up.
Dean Acheson -
How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.
Dean Acheson -
Unfortunately, the hyperbole of the inaugural outran the provisions of the budget.
Dean Acheson -
It is worse than immoral, it's a mistake.
Dean Acheson -
The greatest mistake I made was not to die in office.
Dean Acheson -
The great corrupter of public man is the ego. Looking at the mirror distracts one's attention from the problem.
Dean Acheson
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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.'
Dean Acheson -
Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.
Dean Acheson -
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.
Dean Acheson -
'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.'
Dean Acheson -
'Force can overcome force, but a free society cannot long steel itself to dominate another people by sheer force.'
Dean Acheson -
'The position of the United States had undergone a drastic change; the purpose and capabilities of the State Department had not.'
Dean Acheson
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We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.
Dean Acheson -
'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.'
Dean Acheson -
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.'
Dean Acheson -
'The simple truth is that perseverance in good policies is the only avenue to success...'
Dean Acheson -
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.
Dean Acheson -
'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.'
Dean Acheson
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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.'
Dean Acheson -
'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.'
Dean Acheson -
'The best environment for diplomacy is found where mutual confidence between governments exists...'
Dean Acheson -
If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.
Dean Acheson