The preservation of our free society in the years and decades to come will depend ultimately on whether we succeed or fail in directing the enormous power of human knowledge to the enrichment of our own lives and the shaping of a rational and civilized world order....It is the task of education, more than any other instrument of foreign policy to help close the dangerous gap between the economic and technological interdependence of the people of the world and their psychological, political and spiritual alienation.
J. William FulbrightPower confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence.
J. William FulbrightIt is not our affluence, or our plumbing, or our clogged freeways that grip the imagination of others. Rather, it is the values upon which our system is built. These values imply our adherence not only to liberty and individual freedom, but also to international peace, law and order, and constructive social purpose. When we depart from these values, we do so at our peril.
J. William FulbrightThe essence of intercultural education is the acquisition of empathy-the ability to see the world as others see it, and to allow for the possibility that others may see something we have failed to see, or may see it more accurately. The simple purpose of the exchange program...is to erode the culturally rooted mistrust that sets nations against one another. The exchange program is not a panacea but an avenue of hope.
J. William FulbrightWith respect to the creation of the program, I introduced the bill in September 1945, immediately after the end of the war with Japan, in August of that year. A number of considerations, of course, entered into my decision to introduce the bill, growing from my own experience as a Rhodes scholar and the experiences our government had had with the first Word War debts, [Herbert] Hoover's efforts in establishing the Belgian-American Education Foundation after World War I, [and] the Boxer Rebellion indemnity.
J. William Fulbright