Dean Acheson quotes

Dean Acheson was an American statesman and diplomat who served as U.S. Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman. A key architect of the post-World War II international order, he played a central role in shaping U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War, including the creation of NATO. He influenced major global events and strategies that defined the mid-20th century. Here are 60 of his quotes:

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.

Dean Acheson

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

Dean Acheson

Vietnam was worse than immoral - it was a mistake.

Dean Acheson

How could the USA champion individual freedom in the world generally while denying it to an important minority in its own country.

Dean Acheson

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

Dean Acheson

The simple truth is that perseverance in good policies is the only avenue to success...

Dean Acheson

The test for aid to poor nations is therefore whether it makes them capable of being productive. If it fails to do so, it is likely to make them even poorer in the - not so very - long run.

Dean Acheson

The thing to remember is that that the future comes one day at a time.

Dean Acheson

Negotiation in the classic diplomatic sense assumes parties more anxious to agree than to disagree.

Dean Acheson

We have actively sought and are actively seeking to make the United Nations an effective instrument of international cooperation.

Dean Acheson

My constant appeal to American liberals was to face the long, hard years and not to distract us with the offer of short cuts and easy solutions begotten by good will out of the angels of man's better nature...The road to freedom and peace is a hard one.

Dean Acheson

It is a mistake to interpret too literally and sweepingly the poet's admonition that things are not what they seem. Sometimes they are, and it is often essential to survival to know when they are and when they are not.

Dean Acheson

When Acheson was first joined State as Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs, he writes the following in a section entitled "My Search for a Function"..."My official duties were summed up in the Department of State Bulletin by misleading platitudes...Both (Secretary) Hull and the President...knew me and, surely, had not asked me into the Department to perform the largely nonexistent duties defined in the Bulletin."

Dean Acheson

My memory...is of a department without direction, composed of a lot of busy people working hard and usefully but as a whole not functioning as a foreign office. It did not chart a course to be furthered by the success of our arms, or to aid or guide our arms. Rather it seems to have been adrift carried hither and yon by the currents of war or pushed about by collisions with more purposeful craft.

Dean Acheson

General Marshall was "impatient with a type of nonsense particularly prevalent in the State Department known as 'kicking the problem around.' All of us who have work with General Marshall have reported a recurring outburst of his: 'Don't fight the problem, gentlemen, solve it!' With him the time to be devoted to analysis of a problem, to balancing 'on the one hand' against 'on the other hand,' was definitely limited. The discussion he wanted was about plans of action"

Dean Acheson

I must plead guilty as any of escaping into immediate busywork to keep from the far harder task of peering into a dim future, which, of course, should be one of a diplomat's main duties.

Dean Acheson

I learned from the example of my father that the manner in which one endures what must be endured is more important than the thing that must be endured.

Dean Acheson

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

Dean Acheson

Acheson's State Department "comrades...played a vital role in setting the main lines of American foreign policy for many years to come and...they may feel in their hearts that it was nobly done."

Dean Acheson

Acheson "never for one moment believed that the holding of office was a source of power – it was an obligation of service."

Dean Acheson

I was a frustrated schoolteacher, persisting against overwhelming evidence to the contrary in the belief that the human mind could be moved by facts and reason.

Dean Acheson

In the State Department, one never lacks for helpful suggestions.

Dean Acheson