 I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did. He was completely ignorant. |
| The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute. |
| Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. |
| 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. |
| The price of empire is America's soul, and that price is too high. |
| As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. |
| We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts. |
| There are many respects in which America, if it can bring itself to act with the magnanimity and the empathy appropriate to its size and power, can be an intelligent example to the world. |
| 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 failures. |
| What they fear, I think rightly, is that traditional Vietnamese society cannot survive the American economic and cultural impact. |
| In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another. |
| There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it. |
| The junior senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatreds and prejudices of the American people that he has started a prairie fire which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control. |
| In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith. |
| There has been a strong tradition in this country that it is not the function of the military to educate the public on political issues. |
| Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. |
| I do not question the power of our weapons and the efficiency of our logistics; I cannot say these things delight me as the y seem to delight some of our officials, but they are certainly impressive. |
| To be a statesman, you must first get elected. |
| 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. |
| We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every 10 minutes. |
