Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by John Foster Dulles (American Politician)

John Foster Dulles (1888–1959) was an American Republican politician, political leader, and international lawyer. He was the U.S. adviser at the founding of the United Nations in 1945 and served as U.S. Secretary of State 1953–59. He was the brother of American intelligence officer Allen Welsh Dulles. Their uncle Robert Lansing was U.S. Secretary of State 1915–20.

Born into a family with a diplomatic tradition in Washington, D.C., Dulles was educated at Princeton and the Sorbonne. He attended the Hague Conference of 1907 and served as President Woodrow Wilson’s adviser at the Versailles Conference and an American representative on the Reparations Commission.

During World War II, Dulles was a staunch advocate of a world governmental organization. He represented the U.S. at the Charter Conference of the United Nations and served as U.S. delegate to the General Assembly (1946–48, 1950.) He was briefly a U.S. Senator for New York in 1949 and helped negotiate the peace treaty with Japan in 1951.

In 1953, Dulles became U.S. Secretary of State under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was a significant figure in the early Cold War era, urging Western nations to take an aggressive stance against communism throughout the world. In 1956, after Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, he proposed the Suez Canal Users’ Association and later opposed the Anglo-French military intervention. With declining health, he resigned in 1959.

Dulles’s works include War, Peace, and Change (1939) and War or Peace (1950.) Biographies include Richard Goold-Adams’s John Foster Dulles: A Reappraisal (1962,) Townsend Hoopes’s The Devil and John Foster Dulles (1973,) and his sister Eleanor’s John Foster Dulles: The Last Year (1963.)

The Washington Dulles International Airport in Dulles, Virginia, is named in his honor.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by John Foster Dulles

Meekness is imperfect if it be not both active and passive, leading us to subdue our own passions and resentments, as well as to bear patiently the passions and resentments of others.
—John Foster Dulles

Once—many, many years ago—I thought I made a wrong decision. Of course, it turned out that I had been right all along. But I was wrong to have thought that I was wrong.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Decisions

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Courage, War

Peace will never be won if men reserve for war their greatest efforts, Peace, too, requires well-directed and sustained sacrificial endeavor. Given that, we can, I believe, achieve the great goal of our foreign policy, that of enabling our people to enjoy in peace the blessings of liberty.
—John Foster Dulles

Time is the greatest of all tyrants. As we go on toward age, he taxes our health, limbs, faculties, strength, and features.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Time

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Government

What a superlatively grand and consoling idea is that of death! Without this radiant idea—this delightful morning star, indicating that the luminary of eternity is going to rise, life would, to my view, darken into midnight melancholy. The expectation of living here, and living thus always, would be indeed a prospect of overwhelming despair. But thanks to that fatal decree that dooms us to die; thanks to that gospel which opens the visions of an endless life; and thanks above all to that Saviour friend who has promised to conduct the faithful through the sacred trance of death, into scenes of Paradise and everlasting delight.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Death

Envy’s memory is nothing but a row of hooks to hang up grudges on. Some people’s sensibility is a mere bundle of aversions; and you hear them display and parade it, not in recounting the things they are attached to, but in telling you how many things and persons “they cannot bear.”
—John Foster Dulles

All pleasure must be bought at the price of pain.—The difference between false and true pleasure is this: for the true, the price is paid before you enjoy it; for the false, after you enjoy it.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Pleasure

Retribution is one of the grand principles in the divine administration of human affairs; a requital is imperceptible only to the willfully unobservant. There is everywhere the working of the everlasting law of requital: man always gets as he gives.
—John Foster Dulles

But little is accomplished, because but little is vigorously attempted; and but little is attempted, because difficulties are magnified. A timorously cautious spirit, so far from acting with resolution, will never think itself in possession of the preliminaries for acting at all. Perhaps perseverance has been the radical principle of every truly great character.
—John Foster Dulles

It is wonderful what strength and boldness of purpose and energy will come from the feeling that we are in the way of duty.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Boldness, Bravery, Duty

The here-and-now is no mere filling of time, but a filling of time with God.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: The Present

The atheist is one of the most daring beings in creation—a contemner of God who explodes his laws by denying his existence.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Atheism

We have such an habitual persuasion of the general depravity of human nature, that in falling in with strangers we almost always reckon on their being irreligious, till we discover some specific indication of the contrary.
—John Foster Dulles

Fiction may be more instructive than real history; but the vast rout of romances and novels, as they are, do incalculable mischief. I wish we could collect all together, and make one vast fire of them. I should exult to see the smoke of them ascend, like that of Sodom and Gomorrah: the judgment would be as just.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Romance

It is a poor and disgraceful thing not to be able to reply, with some degree of certainty, to the simple questions, “What will you be?. What will you do?.”
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Decision

Youth is not like a new garment, which we can keep fresh and fair by wearing sparingly. Youth, while we have it, we must wear daily, and it will fast wear away.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Youth

Confront improper conduct, not by retaliation, but by example.
—John Foster Dulles

A man of ability, for the chief of his reading, should select such works as he feels are beyond his own power to have produced. What can other books do for him but waste his time or augment his vanity?
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Reading

The principle of neutrality … has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Dedication, Commitment

In a majority of things habit is a greater plague than ever afflicted Egypt.—In religious character it is a grand felicity.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Habit

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Success & Failure, Success

A man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail.
—John Foster Dulles

Youthful follies growing on old age, are like the few young shoots on the bare top of an old stump of an oak.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Old Age

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Nation, Nationality, Nationalism

An observant man, in all his intercourse with society and the world, constantly and unperceived marks on every person and thing the figure expressive of its value, and therefore, on meeting that person or thing, knows instantly what kind and degree of attention to give it.—This is to make something of experience.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Observation

How important, often, is the pain of guilt, as a stimulant to amendment and reformation.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Reform

Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression.
—John Foster Dulles
Topics: Security, Defense

The bigot sees religion, not as a sphere, but a line; and it is the line in which he is moving. He is like an African buffalo—sees right forward, but nothing on the right or the left. He would not perceive a legion of angels or devils at the distance of ten yards, on the one side or the other.
—John Foster Dulles

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