Truman Doctrine Quotes

I'm very proud of what Harry Truman turned out to be in office and the record he made. Certainly I think he'll go down in history as one of the greats, because of his conscience, his determination to stick with what he knew was right.

Roosevelt was determined to stop Stalin from taking over Eastern Europe. He thought they finally had an agreement on Poland. Before Roosevelt died, he realized that Stalin had broken his agreement.

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

The United States comes in 1945 and we basically blow the whistle.

The last time you and I sat across a conference table in Potsdam [July-August, 1945], I must confess Sir, I held you in very low regard. I loathed your taking the place of Franklin Roosevelt. I misjudged you badly. Since that time, you more than any other man have saved Western Civilization.

In 1953, after the armistice ending the Korean War, South Korea lay in ruins. President Eisenhower was eager to put an end to hostilities that had left his predecessor deeply unpopular, and the war ended in an uneasy stalemate.

My father's political heroes were Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.

President Truman made his name by looking into contracting. And that's how integrity within the military procurement started in the United States.

One of my American heroes is the great former U.S. diplomat George Kennan.

Truman is now seen as a near-great president because he put in place the containment doctrine boosted by the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan and NATO, which historians now see as having been at the center of American success in the cold war.

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way.

Truman has become the patron saint of failed presidents because he left office with a 27 percent approval rating, and people were saying, 'To err is Truman,' yet look at what he did: the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, the Truman Doctrine.

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

The Potsdam Declaration is unworthy of public notice.

My favourite president, and the one I admired most, was Harry Truman.

After World War II, we awoke to find our wartime ally, Stalin, had emerged as a greater enemy than Germany or Japan. Stalin's empire stretched from the Elbe to the Pacific.

Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.

Dwight Eisenhower, the Republican nominee in 1952, made a strong public commitment to ending the war in Korea, where fighting had reached a stalemate.

When we refused to be forced out of Berlin, we demonstrated to the people of Europe that with their cooperation we would act, and act resolutely, when their freedom was threatened.

As to the war with Japan, the President had already received my memorandum in general as to the possibility of getting a substantial unconditional surrender from Japan which I had written before leaving Washington and which he had approved.

And I don't say that we didn't expect it, but we were pleasantly surprised to see the generosity of their foreign policy; and the generosity of their foreign policy at that moment was expressed through the Marshall Plan.

World War II and the ensuing Cold War compelled the United States to develop a sustained commitment to Western Europe and the Far East.

Dean Acheson was one of the very best and brightest of the men who ever came to Washington.

Harry Truman, who was a Bible-believing Christian Zionist, defied the secretary of state he so admired, George C. Marshall, and won a place in Israel's history by recognizing the new state 11 minutes after it declared its independence in 1948.

Like medieval theologians we had a philosophy that explained everything to us in advance, and everything that did not fit could be readily identified as a fraud or a lie or an illusion... The perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman Doctrine arises not from any patent falsehood but from its distortion and simplification of reality, from its universalization and its elevation to the status of a revealed truth.