Dean Acheson Short Quotes

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Vietnam was worse than immoral — it was a mistake.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
The position of the United States had undergone a drastic change; the purpose and capabilities of the State Department had not.

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

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