Dean Acheson Quotes

If the best minds in the world had set out to find us the worst possible location in the world to fight this damnable war, politically and militarily, the unanimous choice would have been Korea.

With a nation, as with a boxer, one of the greatest assurances of safety is to add reach to power.

It is just as full of propaganda as a dog is full of fleas. In fact, I say it’s all fleas and no dog.

Charm never made a rooster.

The Iraqi is really not whacky Toady, perhaps, even tacky. When they gave him the word He gave us the bird And joined with the Arabs, by cracky !

Homage to plain dumb luck.

How gently, wisely, and justly G M Young deals with him. That is not the way to write biography.

Trust him as much as you would a rattlesnake with a silencer on its rattle.

The Canadians seem to be held together with string and safety pins.

You can’t argue with a river, it is going to flow.You can dam it up…put it to useful purposes…deflect it, but you can’t argue with it.

Our name for problems is significant.We call them headaches.You take a powder and they are gone.

Breathless and bewildered like an old lady at a busy intersection.

Courageous and loyal to the tips of his stubby fingers.

His speeches were prepared with that infinite capacity for taking pains, which is said to be genius.

Neither action nor style could have accomplished the result alone.Both were needed.

Much in life cannot be affected…but must be borne…without complaint, because complaints are a bore…and undermine the serenity essential to endurance.

The enormity of the task…[was] just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis.

I had shown my colors. Those who took their red straight, without a chaser of white and blue, were not mollified.

Like finding oneself pregnant and trying to fall in love as quickly as possible.

A real Centaur—part man, part horse’s ass. A rough appraisal, but curiously true.