J. William Fulbright (1905–95,) fully James William Fulbright, was an American lawyer, educator, and politician who initiated the international exchange program for scholars known as the Fulbright scholarship. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he was known for criticizing U.S. military involvement in South Vietnam during his tenure.
Born in Sumner, Missouri, and educated at the University of Arkansas and George Washington University Law School, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and taught law in Washington and Arkansas. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat from Arkansas in 1942. In 1943, he introduced a resolution advocating the creation of the United Nations and was elected to the Senate in 1944.
Fulbright sponsored the Fulbright Act (1946,) which established an exchange scholarship system between the USA and other countries for students and teachers. He distinguished himself in 1954 by opposing Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anti-Communist investigations. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he became a prominent critic of the escalation of the Vietnam War.
Fulbright lost his Senate seat in 1974. His works include Old Myths and New Realities (1965,) The Arrogance of Power (1967,) and The Crippled Giant (1972.) Biographies are Haynes Johnson and Bernard M. Weitzman’s Fulbright: The Dissenter (1968) and Brown Eugene’s J. William Fulbright: Advice and Dissent (1985.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by J. William Fulbright
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but its effects.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Democracy, Dissent
I think we Americans tend to put too high a price on unanimity, as if there were something dangerous and illegitimate about honest differences of opinion honestly expressed by honest men.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Americans
We have the power to do any damn fool thing we want to do, and we seem to do it about every ten minutes.
—J. William Fulbright
It is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.
—J. William Fulbright
We must dare to think ‘unthinkable’ thoughts. We must learn to explore all the options and possibilities that confront us in a complex and rapidly changing world. We must learn to welcome and not to fear the voices of dissent. We must dare to think about ‘unthinkable things’ because when things become unthinkable, thinking stops and action becomes mindless.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Possibilities, Fear, Wisdom, Think, Thinking
In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Understanding
It is amazing how soon one becomes accustomed to the sound of one’s voice, when forced to repeat a speech five or six times a day. As election day approaches, the size of the crowds grows; they are more responsive and more interested; and one derives a certain exhilaration from that which, only a few weeks before, was intensely painful. This is one possible explanation of unlimited debate in the Senate.
—J. William Fulbright
When public men indulge themselves in abuse, when they deny others a fair trial, when they resort to innuendo and insinuation, to libel, scandal, and suspicion, then our democratic society is outraged, and democracy is baffled. It has no apparatus to deal with the boor, the liar, the lout, and the antidemocrat in general.
—J. William Fulbright
It seems to me that it is these extremists who are advocating a soft approach. Their oversimplifications and their baseless generalizations reflect the softness of those who cannot bear to face the burdens of a continuing struggle against a powerful and resourceful enemy. A truly tough approach, in my judgment, is one which accepts the challenge of communism with the courage and determination to meet it with every instrumentality of foreign policypolitical and economic as well as military, and with the willingness to see the struggle through as far into the future as may be necessary. Those who seek to meet the challengeor, in reality, to evade itby bold adventures abroad and witch hunts at home are the real devotees of softnessthe softness of seeking escape from painful realities by resort to illusory panaceas.
—J. William Fulbright
Some new machinery with adequate powers must be created now if our fine phrases and noble sentiments are to have substance and meaning for our children.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Future
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.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Disorder
In our excessive involvement in the affairs of other countries, we are not only living off our assets and denying our own people the proper enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the world the example of a free society enjoying its freedom to the fullest.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Enjoyment
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.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Prejudice
The legislator is an indispensable guardian of our freedom. It is true that great executives have played a powerful role in the development of civilization, but such leaders appear sporadically, by chance. They do not always appear when they are most needed. The great executives have given inspiration and push to the advancement of human society, but it is the legislator who has given stability and continuity to that slow and painful progress.
—J. William Fulbright
The citizen who criticizes his country is paying it an implied tribute.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Patriotism
To me, the irony of this involvement with size, as I observed earlier, is the unwillingness or inability of so many Americans to identify themselves with something as vast as the United States. Bigger cars, bigger parking lots, bigger corporate structures, bigger farms, bigger drug stores, bigger supermarkets, bigger motion-picture screens. The tangible and the functional expand, while the intangible and the beautiful shrink. Left to wither is the national purpose, national educational needs, literature and theater, and our critical faculties. The national dialogue is gradually being lost in a froth of misleading self-congratulation and cliche. National needs and interests are slowly being submerged by the national preoccupation with the irrelevant.
—J. William Fulbright
The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements. I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Government
We must dare to think unthinkable thoughts.
—J. William Fulbright
Topics: Health, Optimism, Positive Attitudes
What a curious picture it is to find man, homo sapiens, of divine origin, we are told, seriously considering going underground to escape the consequences of his own folly. With a little wisdom and foresight, surely it is not yet necessary to forsake life in the fresh air and in the warmth of the sunlight. What a paradox if our own cleverness in science should force us to live underground with the moles.
—J. William Fulbright
Nature pitiless in a pitiless universe is certainly not concerned with the survival of Americans or, for that matter, of any of the two billion people now inhabiting this earth. Hence, our destiny, with the aid of God, remains in our own hands.
—J. William Fulbright
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