J. William Fulbright Quotes

A pre-emptive war in 'defense' of freedom would surely destroy freedom, because one simply cannot engage in barbarous action without becoming a barbarian, because one cannot defend human values by calculated and unprovoked violence without doing mortal damage to the values one is trying to defend

This isn't a mob, won't need to change the names. Everyone around you has murdered someone, something sacred. There isn't one nail without dirt under it. There isn't any white cotton panties that aren't soaked and stained red. It's better to push something when it's slipping, than to risk being dragged down.

Nothing can justify war.

There is so much that must be done in a civilized barbarism like war.

The public weal requires that men should betray, and lie, and massacre.

If the battle for civilization comes down to the wimps versus the barbarians, the barbarians are going to win.

... bloody and barbarous heathens.

When you join the CIA, you have to make some peace with whether you are comfortable psychologically and philosophically, with the use of force and using it clandestinely.

The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European but an Asiatic and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinaman or a Japanese and, from what I’ve seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other amiable characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and is an all out son of a bitch, a barbarian, and a chronic drunk.

Cut off their heads! Burn their houses down!

… thrashing a cannibal

It is very difficult to do one's duty. I was considered a barbarian because at the storming of the Praga, 7,000 people were killed. Europe says that I am a monster. I myself have read this in the papers, but I would have liked to talk to people about this and ask them: is it not better to finish a war with the death of 7,000 people rather than to drag it on and kill 100,000.

France, because it was attacked cowardly, shamelessly, violently, France will be merciless against the barbarians of Daesh.

Citizens of Rome might boast that the claim of 'Civus romanus sum' set them apart from barbarians and slaves, and it was true up to a point, but Roman citizens lived in a society that accepted pain, cruelty, and torture as the norm, and in which there was no suggestion of equality at birth or mercy in the afterlife.

Evil is tolerable if purged of coarseness.

It's unnatural to fight somebody who has nothing against you and never did anything to you or to your family, who never stole anything from you. And now you've got to go and try to dismantle this guy.

Become corrupt, corrupt, and you will cease to suffer!" This has been the cry of all cities to man.

The Thracian people, like the bloodiest of the barbarians, being ever most murderous when it has nothing to fear.

Be sure that religion cannot be right that a man is the worse for having.

I killed the whole world, and you can too, if you try hard.

War,--the trade of barbarians!

Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

War is a foolish, childish, animalistic, unthinking, unintelligent way of trying to accomplish a purpose.

To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.

Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.