Dulles Quotes & Sayings

[The Soviet State Security Service] is more than a secret police organization, more than an intelligence and counter-intelligence organization. It is an instrument for subversion, manipulation and violence, for secret intervention in the affairs of other countries. — Allen W. Dulles

At least we're getting the kind of experience we need for the next war. — Allen Dulles

Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression. — John Foster Dulles

The Church therefore has one inescapable task: To lift up Christ. When she seeks to lift herself up she becomes weak, but when she acknowledges her own weakness and proclaims her Lord, she is strong. — Avery Dulles

Maximum security exists concerning the subject of UFOs. — Allen Dulles

Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power. — John Foster Dulles

The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization. — John Foster Dulles

There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction. — John Foster Dulles

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art ... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face ... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action. — John Foster Dulles

Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace, let us mobilize the potentialities, particularly the moral and spiritual potentialities, which we usually reserve for war. — John Foster Dulles

During the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers would finally be given full license to exercise their power in the global arena. In the name of defending the free world from Communist tyranny, they would impose an American reign on the world enforced by nuclear terror and cloak-and-dagger brutality. — David Talbot

The American people don't read. — Allen Dulles

The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good. — John Foster Dulles

One of our greatest assets is that all men aspire to be equal and free. This fact haunts the rulers of the Kremlin today for even they cannot change this law of nature and they know it. It is up to us, not only by example but by positive acts, to make the most of this driving force within mankind. — Allen Dulles

Dulles was fortunate to find someone like Mary, a woman whose morals were conveniently flexible - or, as she herself put it, a woman with a "sophisticated point of view." She had a curious way of explaining her moral dexterity, but Dulles certainly would have endorsed her way of thinking. "In order to engage in intelligence work successfully," Mary observed, "it was essential to have a very clear-cut idea of your own moral values, so that if you were forced by necessity to break them, you were fully conscious of what you were doing and why. — David Talbot

If you stand with the Customs and Border Protection officers who staff the passport booths at Dulles airport near the nation's capital, their task seems daunting. — David K. Shipler

Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor. — John Foster Dulles

The Soviets sought not a place in the sun, but the sun itself. Their objective was the world. They would not tolerate compromise on goals, only on tactics. — John Foster Dulles

It turns out, my suitcase was vibrating on departure from Dulles, according to the security task force guy, so the police took it off the flight. Everything was in that bag. My contact lens stuff. One red tie with blue strips. One blue tie with red stripes. These are regimental stripes, not club tie stripes. And one solid red tie. — Chuck Palahniuk

When asked about how he could have offered the Warren Report, full of inconsistencies, to the American people with a straight face, Dulles is reported to have said, "The American people don't read. — Michael C. Ruppert

Adolf Hitler declared war in 1941. By 1942, Allen Dulles was moved to Switzerland for the purpose of rounding up and importing German scientific "specialists" to the United States. Two years before the war ended (or its fate was decided), the United States was making arrangements for Nazi scientists, arms experts, to come to our democracy (for which the boys were fighting and dying at that moment).12 From 1945 until 1952, the U.S. military brought over 642 alien "specialists" and their families from Nazi Germany. They were known collectively by the code-name "Paperclip." German missile and rocket experts, munition makers, war experts were carefully selected and placed in aerospace programs and armament manufacturing.13 — Mae Brussell

I wouldn't attach too much importance to these student riots. I remember when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasionally. — John Foster Dulles

Peace will never be won if men reserve for war their greatest efforts, Peace, too, requires well-directed and sustained sacrificial endeavor. Given that, we can, I believe, achieve the great goal of our foreign policy, that of enabling our people to enjoy in peace the blessings of liberty. — John Foster Dulles

Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace. — John Foster Dulles

Alaska is much larger than France and Germany - combined. Yet its population is less than one-tenth that of New York City. Keep that in mind the next time you hear some environmentalist hysteria about the danger of "spoiling" Alaska by drilling for oil in an area smaller than Dulles Airport. — Thomas Sowell

In order to bring a nation to support the burdens of maintaining great military establishments, it is necessary to create an emotional state akin to war psychology. There must be the portrayal of an external menace. This involves the development to a high degree of the nation-hero, nation-villain ideology and the arousing of the population to a sense of sacrifice. Once these exist, we have gone a long way on the path to war. — John Foster Dulles

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. — Norodom Sihanouk

An intelligence service is the ideal vehicle for a conspiracy. — Allen Dulles

But this could be interpreted primarily in terms of the ministry of word and sacrament, in accordance with the previous models of the Church, rather than in terms of caritative service. — Avery Dulles

A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good. — John Foster Dulles

The principle of neutrality ... has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception. — John Foster Dulles

The mark of a successful organization isn't whether or not it has problems, its whether it has the same problems it had last year. — John Foster Dulles

Our institutions of freedom will not survive unless they are constantly replenished by the faith that gave them birth. — John Foster Dulles

If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millenia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture. — Avery Dulles

I'm making progress if today's problems are different from yesterday's. — John Foster Dulles

If Dulles could use a person, that person was somehow real for him. If not, that person didn't exist. — David Talbot

A peaceful world is a world in which differences are tolerated, and are not eliminated by violence. — John Foster Dulles

[John Foster Dulles] invented Brinkmanship, the most popular game since Monopoly. — Richard Armour

In our discussion of the need for balanced ministry fronts in chapter 23, we looked at the five models of church proposed by Avery Dulles: "the church as institution" (which we might call doctrine driven); "the church as mystical communion" (worship driven); "the church as sacrament" (community driven); "the church as herald" (evangelism driven); and "the church as servant" (justice driven). — Timothy Keller

Under dictatorship, people are enslaved but they know it," he told de Mohrenschildt, recalling his days in the Soviet Union. "Here, the politicians constantly lie to people and they become immune to these lies because they have the privilege of voting. But voting is rigged and democracy here is a gigantic profusion of lies and clever brainwashing." Oswald worried about the FBI's police-state surveillance tactics. And he believed that America was turning more "militaristic" as it increasingly interfered in the internal affairs of other countries. — David Talbot

Freedom & Duty always go hand in hand and if the free do not accept the duty of social responsibility, they will not long remain free. — John Foster Dulles

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. — John Foster Dulles

Once - many, many years ago - I thought I made a wrong decision. Of course, it turned out that I had been right all along. But I was wrong to have thought that I was wrong. — John Foster Dulles

We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. — John Foster Dulles

Hoping to settle the wheelchair matter once and for all, Graham dragged his chief of construction, his chief of architecture, and a film crew out to Dulles Airport, whose escalators were approximately the same width as those planned for Metro. There he produced a variety of braces and crutches. As the cameras rolled, Graham rode up and down the escalators using one aid after another, climaxing by riding both directions in a wheelchair, facing up each time. Graham clearly believed he had proved beyond doubt that 'it is entirely possible, easily and safely, for wheelchair travelers to use escalators.' His aides watched in disbelief; a fit and fearless major general in his fifties hardly represented the disabled population, whatever braces he strapped to his legs. All he had proved, concluded the WMATA architect Sprague Thresher, was that 'if everybody who had to use a wheelchair was Jack Graham, we wouldn't need elevators. — Zachary M. Schrag

Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence. — John Foster Dulles

I am aware how almost impossible it is in this country to carry out a foreign policy not approved by the Jews. — John Foster Dulles

At the first meeting of the newly constituted Warren Commission, [former CIA Director] Allen Dulles handed out copies of a book to help define the ideological parameters he proposed for the Commission's forthcoming work. American assassinations were different from European ones, he told the Commission. European assassinations were the work of conspiracies, whereas American assassins acted alone. — Peter Dale Scott

Me, while I'm heading west, asleep at Mach 0.83, or 455 miles an hour, or true airspeed, the FBI is bomb-squading my suitcase on a vacated runway back in Dulles. Nine out of ten times, the security task force guy says, the vibration is an electric razor. The other time, it's a vibrating dildo.
Imagine, the task force guy says, telling a passenger on arrival that a dildo kept her baggage on the East Coast. Sometimes it's even a man. It's airline policy not to imply ownership in the event of a dildo. Use the indefinite article.
A dildo.
Never your dildo.
Never say the dildo accidentally turned itself on.
A dildo activated itself and created an emergency situation that required the evacuating of your baggage. — Chuck Palahniuk

A man's accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail. — John Foster Dulles

The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith. — John Foster Dulles

The United States of America does not have friends; it has interests. — John Foster Dulles

The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year — John Foster Dulles

In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do - because they were Americans. — Stephen Kinzer

Allan Dulles said it best: "Any intelligence service worth its salt can make the other fellow's currency." In other words, every nation needs to have its own airtight security measures, while at the same time be actively working in secret to reverse engineer those of the enemy faster than they can invent them. — Antonio J. Mendez