Dean Acheson Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

Comrades... played a vital role in setting the main lines of American foreign policy for many years to come and... they may feel in their hearts that it was nobly done.

Dean Acheson
I must plead guilty as any of escaping into immediate busywork to keep the far harder task of peering into a dim future, which, of course, should be one of a diplomat's main duties.

Dean Acheson
The conclusion was... unpalatable to believers in American omnipotence, to whom every goal unattained is explicable only by incompetence or treason.

Dean Acheson
Among the roles the Budget Bureau (now OMB) was that of constant critic and improver of administration in the federal executive branch. In my day this work had fallen to the products of graduate schools in civil administration. Their ideas... seemed to me theoretical nonsense.

Dean Acheson
President Truman used to say that budget figures revealed far more of proposed policy than speeches.

Dean Acheson
... to tell a tale of large conceptions, great achievements... Its hero is the American people.

Dean Acheson
Time spent in the advertising business seems to create a permanent deformity like the Chinese habit of footbinding.

Dean Acheson
My memory... is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.

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
In the State Department, one never lacks for helpful suggestions.

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
... the Assistant Secretary in Charge of Administration (was) a job which should be undertaken only by a saint or a fool... the House and Senate subcommittees in charge of appropriations, their chairmen, and the Comptroller General's office make this job perfect hell. Like an ill-tempered chatelaine of a medieval manor, her keys hanging from her belt, Congress parsimoniously and suspiciously doles out supplies for the shortest time, each item meticulously weighed and measured, each request at first harshly denied. Almost simultaneously yesterday's accounting goes on amid screamed accusation and denunciation of every purpose of policy.

Dean Acheson
There is perhaps nothing more important in the world today than the steadiness and consistency of the foreign policy of this Republic. Too much depends on the United States for us to indulge in the luxury of either undue pessimism or premature optimism.

Dean Acheson
... old inhabitants of the bureaucratic jungle like (Secretary) Hull knew that Cabinet boards and committees were paper tigers. They made a fine show in a parade but soon dissolved in the rain... After attend a few meetings (of this board), the Secretary deputized me to 'explain his absence' and substitute for him.

Dean Acheson
The rarest gift that God bestows on man is the capacity for decision.

Dean Acheson
Force can overcome force, but a free society cannot long steel itself to dominate another people by sheer force.

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
I did not share President's view on the Palestine solution... The number that could be absorbed by Arab Palestine without creating a grave political problem would be inadequate, and to transform the country into a Jewish state capable of receiving a million or more immigrants would vastly exacerbate the political problem and imperil not only American but all Western influence in the Near East.

Dean Acheson
General Marshall was "impatient with a type of nonsense particularly prevalent in the State Department known as 'kicking the problem around.' All of us who have work with General Marshall have reported a recurring outburst of his: 'Don't fight the problem, gentlemen, solve it!' With him the time to be devoted to analysis of a problem, to balancing 'on the one hand' against 'on the other hand,' was definitely limited. The discussion he wanted was about plans of action "

Dean Acheson
President (Truman) observed (that) 'to assure the Arabs that they would be consulted (prior to official US recognition of Israel) was by no means inconsistent with my generally sympathetic attitudes toward Jewish aspirations.' The Arabs may be forgiven for believing that this did not exactly state the inconsistency as they saw it.

Dean Acheson
I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office.

Dean Acheson
Not all the arts of diplomacy are learned solely in its practice. There are other exercise yards.

Dean Acheson
To leave positions of great responsibility and authority is to die a little, but the time comes when that must be faced.

Dean Acheson
147, on the situation in Greece: "imminent collapse due to mounting guerrilla activity, supplied and directed from outside, economic chaos, and the Greek governmental inability to meet the crisis."

Dean Acheson