Winston Churchill Quotes

I thought that in general we in the United States were too optimistic in believing that the Soviets might alter what had been for a long time, as a matter of fact for centuries, fundamental Russian policies in respect to the rest of the world.

Graham Greene, as I understand it, was quite outspoken in his criticism of American foreign policy.

Containment was merely appeasement on the installment plan.

Adlai the appeaser ... who got a Ph.D. from Dean Acheson's College of Cowardly Communist Containment.

The United States is as weak as the Soviet Union. If enough pressure is applied to them, they will pull out of the Middle East.

Our opposition to Communist expansion is not an absolute factor; containment must be taken in relation to American security and American objectives.

During his last 18 months in office, Eisenhower flew to Asia, Europe, and Latin America and deployed his war hero's popularity to seek new friends for America while trying to improve relations with Moscow. By the time Ike left office, most Americans had forgotten their anger over losing the space race to the Soviets.

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South East Asia Treaty Organization.

We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

I mean, like a lot of kids growing up in the early seventies, I was fed Dr. Kissinger with my Fruit Loops. He was the Dr. Ruth of American foreign policy, and the model statesman.

People were really interested in what was going on because of the international context of the Cold War.

In 1945, at the beginning of the Cold War, our leaders led us astray. We need to think of the Cold War as an aberration, a wrong turn. As such, we need to go back to where we were in 1945 - before we took the road to a permanent war economy, a national security state and a foreign policy based on unilateralism and cowboy triumphalism.

Our use of the United Nations as an instrument for opposing Soviet expansion. prior to the conclusion of peace, has strained that institution severely. It has an increasing tendency to alarm smaller nations and to paralyze, rather than stimulate, their will to play an active part in the organization

The policy of freedom for Eastern Europe was for domestic purposes only for an America that did not want to face its limited power in the world.

We [the Russians] are going to do something terrible to you [America]—we are going to deprive you of an enemy.

We should get back to the ... doctrine of brinkmanship, where everybody knows we have the power and will use it.

One of these days I’m going to blast President Truman’s State Department wide open.

Now we are in a period which I can characterize as a cold peace.

A stable world may be one in which the United States can act to secure peace without fear of a nuclear attack.

My last words to you, my son and successor, are: Never trust the Russians!

U. S. foreign policy in the 20th century was characterized by disastrous oscillations between over-commitment and isolation

The engagement policy of détente made the United States number two in a world where it is dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best

… this whole Near East problem is not just an Arab-Israeli dispute but a problem of the influence of the West as opposed to that of the Soviet. We want no wars, but we do not want a Sovietized world.

When I came to Congress in 1993, the traditional idea that all politics stopped at the water's edge was alive and well. Americans had been unified for the previous four decades against the threat from the former Soviet Union and communism.

If we can deter the Soviet Union, if we can deter North Korea, why on earth can't we deter Iran?