To be a statesman, you must first get elected.
We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.
There is an inevitable divergence between the world as it is and the world as men perceive it.
Maturity requires a final accommodation between our aspirations and our limitations.
As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations.
Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.
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 greatest single virtue of a strong legislature is not what it can do, but what it can prevent.
This is regrettable indeed for a nation that aspires to teach democracy to other nations, because, as Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.”
It is a curiosity of human nature that lack of self-assurance seems to breed an exaggerated sense of power and mission.
We would be deliberately violating the fundamental obligations we assumed in the Act of Bogota establishing the Organization of American States.
A nation’s budget is full of moral implications; it tells what a society cares about and what it does not care about; it tells what its values are.
I do not think it is “selling America short” when we ask a great deal of her; on the contrary, it is those who ask nothing, those who see no fault, who are really selling America short!
It’s unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people.
The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life.
We are inclined to confuse freedom and democracy, which we regard as moral principles, with the way in which they are practiced in America with capitalism, federalism, and the two-party system, which are not moral principles but simply the preferred and accepted practices of the American people.
Israel controls the United States Senate.
Science has radically changed the conditions of human life on earth. It has expanded our knowledge and our power, but not our capacity to use them with wisdom.
The American public has become so conditioned by crises, by warnings, by words, that there are few, other than the young, who protest against what is happening.
Intolerance of dissent is a well-noted feature of the American national character.