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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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