J. William Fulbright Quotes

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations

There is nothing obscure about the objectives of educational exchange. Its purpose is to acquaint Americans with the world as it is and to acquaint students and scholars from many lands with America as it is-not as we wish it were or as we might wish foreigners to see it, but exactly as it is-which by my reckoning is an "image" of which no American need be ashamed.

Well, the thing that I learned as a diplomat is that human relations ultimately make a huge difference.

The exchange program is the thing that reconciles me to all the difficulties of political life. It's the only activity that gives me some hope that the human race won't commit suicide, though I still wouldn't count on it.

My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your enemy. We sometimes make mistakes. We have not been perfect.

Of all the joint ventures in which we might engage, the most productive, in my view, is educational exchange. I have always had great difficulty-since the initiation of the Fulbright scholarships in 1946-in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign-policy activities.

No one who has lived through the second half of the 20th century could possibly be blind to the enormous impact of exchange programs on the future of countries.

[In Moscow] we got through to [Soviet leaders] Brezhnev and Kosygin on the telephone. I think it was because nobody had ever tried to call them at home before.

Finally, the Program aims, through these means, to bring a little more knowledge, a little more reason, and a little more compassion into world affairs and thereby to increase the chance that nations will learn at last to live in peace and friendship.

We have very close humanitarian contacts [with China], wide-ranging youth exchanges, educational and regional contacts, and all of them continue to develop.

I serve like a bridge. I go to other cultures, learn, put myself in different situations and learn as much as I can, and then go to Western cultures to give. I'm doing this bridging all the time.

We must teach the next generation to not just learn languages, but whole cultures and belief systems. We will then make more of an effort to understand people and their different cultures.

I really think it's extremely important for Americans to better understand China. And by better, I mean don't just read their lines. You've got to dig down to find out what's going on, and come over, see China.

There are plenty of meetings, receptions, dinners, and so if you are [at the U.N.] any length of time, and I was there for four and a half years, you formed pretty significant relationships with people from all over the world. And that's important to the work you do. If you're trying to rally the General Assembly to vote for something that matters to the United States, those personal relationships count.

As the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry.

You [young people] all are just much more internationally-minded and traveled and knowledgeable in languages than any other previous generation. So many of you are already doing a lot of international relations, I think. I so believe in student networks, and people that either study abroad or come to the United States to study, and the relationships that you all develop. You learn a lot from each other, but you all will see each other again in jobs along the way. And I think that makes a big difference. I so believe in what students can do.

Whatever has a tendency to promote the civil intercourse of nations by an exchange of benefits is a subject as worthy of philosophy as of politics.

Anyone can speak Troll. All you have to do is point and grunt.

How can there be peace without people understanding each other; and how can this be if they don't know each other?

With respect to the creation of the program, I introduced the bill in September 1945, immediately after the end of the war with Japan, in August of that year. A number of considerations, of course, entered into my decision to introduce the bill, growing from my own experience as a Rhodes scholar and the experiences our government had had with the first Word War debts, [Herbert] Hoover's efforts in establishing the Belgian-American Education Foundation after World War I, [and] the Boxer Rebellion indemnity.

I look forward to my first visit to Israel. Music is a universal language that is meant to unify audiences in peace and love, and that is the spirit of our show.

The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues.

The spirit of seeking understanding through personal contact with people of other nations and other cultures deserves the respect and support of all.

Foreign policy isn't something that is great and big, it's common sense and humanity as it applies to my affairs and yours.