Dean Acheson Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull. This is not always easy to achieve.

Dean Acheson
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Dean Acheson
Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.

Dean Acheson
… talk should precede, not follow, the issuance of orders.

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
Unfortunately, the hyperbole of the inaugural outran the provisions of the budget.

Dean Acheson
The simple truth is that perseverance in good policies is the only avenue to success...

Dean Acheson
The experiences of the years... have brought the country, particularly its young people, to a mood of depression, disillusion, and withdrawal from the effort to affect the world.

Dean Acheson
An extraordinary man. A real Centaur—part man, part horse's ass. A rough appraisal, but curiously true.

Dean Acheson
He smiled with the spontaneity of a mechanical tiger.

Dean Acheson
Controversial proposals, once accepted, soon become hallowed.

Dean Acheson
Only immediate assertion of leadership by the United States could prevent war in the next decade... The President and the Secretary of State must shock the country into a realization of its peril...

Dean Acheson
The best environment for diplomacy is found where mutual confidence between governments exists...

Dean Acheson
My official duties were summed up in the Department of State Bulletin by misleading platitudes... Both (Secretary) Hull and the President... knew me and, surely, had not asked me into the Department to perform the largely nonexistent duties defined in the Bulletin.

Dean Acheson
A "mixture of frustration and progress is the daily grind of foreign affairs."

Dean Acheson
I've never for one moment believed that the holding of office was a source of power – it was an obligation of service.

Dean Acheson
I soon discovered that the greater part of a day in Old State was devoted to meetings. Where the boundaries of jurisdiction were fuzzy or overlapping, meetings became inevitable. Most questions affected a number of functional and geographic divisions... These meetings gave the illusion of action, but often frustrated it by attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable. What was most often needed was not compromise but decision.

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 situation was still too delicate for complete candor and the ultimate truth too unformed for statement.

Dean Acheson
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
My constant appeal to American liberals was to face the long, hard years and not to distract us with the offer of short cuts and easy solutions begotten by good will out of the angels of man's better nature... The road to freedom and peace is a hard one.

Dean Acheson
He struck me as looking like a pear on top of two toothpicks.

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
Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere...

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
Plainly plenty of work was waiting to be done. The question was: would the State Department do it? I proposed to have a shot at finding out.

Dean Acheson
With a nation, as with a boxer, one of the greatest assurances of safety is to add reach to power.

Dean Acheson
I have a curious and apprehensive feeling as I watch JFK that he is sort of an Indian snake charmer.

Dean Acheson
Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.
, 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
The heads of these divisions, like barons in a feudal system weakened at the top by mutual suspicion and jealousy between king and prince, were constantly at odds if not at war... For the most part the barons were knowledgeable people performing in a way the times had completely outdated, a fact of which they were quite unaware.

Dean Acheson