United States Secretaries Of State

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

"Wake up, America. Your liberties are being stolen before your very eyes. What Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln fought for, Truman, Acheson, and McGrath are striving desperately to nullify. Wake up, Americans, and dare to think and say and do. Dare to cry: No More War!"

"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.""

"If I have said nothing new tonight, it may well be because, in a family of nations as in families of individuals we should expect nothing more sensational than growth."

"To State Department employees: "Yours is not an easy task nor one which is much appreciated. You don't ask much of your fellow citizens, and if any of you are so inexperienced that you ever do, you will receive very little. Certainly not much in the form of material recompense; certainly not much in the form of appreciation for your work, because you are dealing with matters which, though they affect life of every citizen of this country intimately, do it in ways which it is not easy for every citizen to understand. And so you are dealing in a field which I called the other day a field of 'alien knowledge,' which seems strange to many of your fellow citizens … We have a tradition in this country of skepticism about government, of looking at it very carefully, of seeing whether our public servants can take it. That isn't always comfortable, but, on the whole, it is good. Any time when there are governments in the world which are crushing the liberties of their citizens, it is good that in this great country people look with some skepticism upon government as such. That is one of our traditions … ""

"As you know, very recently the secretary of state proclaimed his loyalty to a man guilty of what has always been considered as the most abominable of all crimes — of being a traitor to the people who gave him a position of great trust. The secretary of state, in attempting to justify his continued devotion to the man who sold out the Christian world to the atheistic world, referred to Christ's Sermon on the Mount as a justification and reason therefore, and the reaction of the American people to this would have made the heart of Abraham Lincoln happy. When this pompous diplomat in striped pants, with a phony British accent, proclaimed to the American people that Christ on the Mount endorsed communism, high treason, and betrayal of a sacred trust, the blasphemy was so great that it awakened the dormant indignation of the American people. He has lighted the spark which is resulting in a moral uprising and will end only when the whole sorry mess of twisted warped thinkers are swept from the national ugly so ugly that we may have a new birth of national honesty and decency in government."

"There is perhaps nothing more important in the world today than the steadiness and consistency of the foreign policy of this Republic. Too much depends on the United States for us to indulge in the luxury of either undue pessimism or premature optimism."

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

"Force can overcome force, but a free society cannot long steel itself to dominate another people by sheer force."

"… talk should precede, not follow, the issuance of orders."

"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."

"The qualities which produce the dogged, unbeatable courage of the British, personified at the time by Winston Churchill, can appear in other settings as stubbornness bordering on stupidity."

"The best environment for diplomacy is found where mutual confidence between governments exists..."

"… the situation was still too delicate for complete candor and the ultimate truth too unformed for statement."

"The position of the United States had undergone a drastic change; the purpose and capabilities of the State Department had not."

"a "mixture of frustration and progress is the daily grind of foreign affairs.""

"The conclusion was...unpalatable to believers in American omnipotence, to whom every goal unattained is explicable only by incompetence or treason."

"I will undoubtedly have to seek what is happily known as gainful employment, which I am glad to say does not describe holding public office."

"Throughout the Near East lay rare tinder for anti-Western propaganda: a Moslem culture and history, bitter Arab nationalism galled by Jewish immigration under British protection and with massive American financial support, the remnants of a colonial status, and a sense of grievance that a vast natural resource was being extracted by foreigners under arrangements thought unfair to those living on the surface. This tinder could be, and was, lighted everywhere..."

"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."

"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."

"I think Scowcroft has done us all a great favor by his article saying don't do it. My own personal view is that basically General Scowcroft is correct. Unless the president can make a very compelling case that Saddam Hussein has his finger on a weapon of mass destruction and is about ready to use it, I do not think that now is the time to go to war against Saddam Hussein."

"I hold that the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding states between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good. A positive good."

"A power has risen up in the government greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks."

"The very essence of a free government consists in considering offices as public trusts, bestowed for the good of the country, and not for the benefit of an individual or a party."

"The Government of the absolute majority instead of the Government of the people is but the Government of the strongest interests; and when not efficiently checked, it is the most tyrannical and oppressive that can be devised."

"I consider the tariff act as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick [sic] institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil and climate have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union, against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states they must in the end be forced to rebel, or, submit it to have their paramount interests sacrifices, their domestick [sic] institutions subordinated by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness. Thus situated, the denial of the right of the State to interpose constitutionally in the last resort, more alarms the thinking, than all the other causes; and however strange it may appear, the more universally the state is condemned, and her right denied, the more resolute she is to assert her constitutional powers lest the neglect to assert should be considered a practical abandonment of them, under such circumstances."

"If it be conceded, as it must by every one who is the least conversant with our institutions, that the sovereign power is divided between the states and general government, and that the former holds its reserved rights, in the same high sovereign capacity, which the latter does its delegated rights; it will be impossible to deny to the states the right of deciding on the infraction of their rights, and the proper remedy to be applied for the correction. The right of judging, in such cases, is an essential attribute of sovereignty of which the states cannot be divested, without losing their sovereignty itself; and being reduced to a subordinate corporate condition. In fact, to divide power, and to give to one of the parties the exclusive right of judging of the portion allotted to each, is in reality not to divide at all; and to reserve such exclusive right to the general government, (it matters not by what department it be exercised,) is in fact to constitute it one great consolidated government, with unlimited powers, and to reduce the states to mere corporations."

"The neighboring tribes are becoming daily less warlike, and more helpless and dependent on us … [T]hey have, in a great measure, ceased to be an object of terror, and have become that of commiseration."

"Protection and patriotism are reciprocal."

"The old Jackson men of the inner set still speak of Mr. Calhoun in terms which show that they consider him at once the most wicked and the most despicable of American statesmen. He was a coward, conspirator, hypocrite, traitor, and fool, say they. He strove, schemed, dreamed, lived, only for the presidency; and when he despaired of reaching that office by honorable means, he sought to rise upon the ruins of his country-thinking it better to reign in South Carolina than to serve in the United States. General Jackson lived and died in this opinion. In his last sickness he declared that, in reflecting upon his administration, he chiefly regretted that he had not had John C. Calhoun executed for treason. "My country," said the General, "would have sustained me in the act, and his fate would have been a warning to traitors in all time to come.""

"A friend, Mary Bates, observed that she “never heard him utter a jest,” and Daniel Webster in his eulogy said he had never known a man “who wasted less of life in what is called recreation, or employed less of it in any pursuits not immediately connected with the discharge of his duty.” Duty is the word, for duty was the demonic force in Calhoun. "I hold the duties of life to be greater than life itself," he once wrote. "... I regard this life very much as a struggle against evil, and that to him who acts on proper principle, the reward is in the struggle more than in victory itself, although that greatly enhances it." In adult life to relax and play are in a certain sense to return to the unrestrained spirits of childhood. There is reason to believe that Calhoun was one of those people who have had no childhood to return to. This, perhaps, was what Harriet Martineau sensed when she said that he seemed never to have been born. His political lieutenant, James H. Hammond, remarked after his death: "Mr. Calhoun had no youth, to our knowledge. He sprang into the arena like Minerva from the head of Jove, fully grown and clothed in armor: a man every inch himself, and able to contend with any other man.""

"In conclusion, what estimate should be made of Calhoun as a political theorist ? Certainly upon many points in his system the political science of the past half-century has pronounced favorable judgment. This is notably true in regard to his repudiation of the Naturrecht theory of an original state of nature and a social contract antecedent to the establishment of government. His assertion of the unity and indivisibility of sovereignty is also in accord with the doctrine now generally accepted by political scientist.On these questions he reasoned with great clearness and force. From another point of view, however, his reasoning, though keen and strong, was- narrow and cramped. Calhoun seemed to lack the proper historical perspective. Thus he saw that an inferior and a superior race can with difficulty coexist on the same territory on terms of entire equality, but he applied this doctrine in defense of the institution of slavery long after its death-knell had been sounded throughout the civilized world. The argument from the inequality of races could not justify the complete denial of civil and political rights to the lower race, in the nineteenth century and in the United States. Calhoun saw clearly, what De Tocqueville and Bryce have pointed out, namely, the danger of party or majority despotism in a democracy, but he failed to see the impracticability under the given conditions of such a scheme as the " concurrent majority" or nullification. He perceived the difficulty involved in a divided sovereignty, but he overlooked the nationalizing influences that were at work in the United States, and hence failed to see that this very doctrine of the divisibility of sovereignty was the safeguard of states' rights, and that, if conflict were precipitated, the one and indivisible sovereignty would fall to the nation. Granting, for the sake of argument, his favorite premise that the states were originally sovereign, it did not follow socially, economically, politically that they were still so situated. Calhoun's reasoning was keen and acute, rather than broad and comprehensive.' Logic seemed to overbalance the historical sense; his conclusions, therefore, were brilliant examples of dialectics, but ill adapted to the time and place in which he lived.Yet, when all is considered, one must rank Calhoun as among the strongest of American political theorists in the first half of the nineteenth century. Clear in his style of expression, keen and vigorous in the use of logic, Calhoun developed a formidable body of political theory, not easy to attack and overthrow. His influence in determining the course of southern political thought was very great and entitles him to the first place among the theorists of his school. This is as true of his political philosophy as of his public law; for in both Calhoun's influence was predominant."

"For one hundred years, southern politics had remained frozen in time. The Democratic Party had been the party of John Caldwell Calhoun, the Yale-educated South Carolinian who fought in the decades leading up to the Civil War for the southern plantation/slave-owning way of life under the banner of states' rights. To white southerners, the Republican Party was the hated Yankee party of Abraham Lincoln that had forced them to release their Negro property. After Reconstruction, neither party had much to offer the Negroes, so for another century white southerners stayed true to their party and the Democrats could count on a solid block of Democratic states in the South. The point George Wallace was making in his independent run for president was that southern Democrats wanted something different from what the Democratic Party was offering, even though they were not going to become Republicans. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina was expressing the same idea as early as 1948 when he ran against Truman as the candidate for president for a party significantly named the States' Rights Party."

"Calhoun is remembered for what he did in the latter half of his adult life. In those years, he rationalized slavery, suppressed freedom of speech, and legitimized secession."

"John Calhoun, if you secede from my nation I will secede your head from the rest of your body."

"The first protective tariff in American history was introduced by Calhoun and supported by Madison and Jefferson, and opposed by Webster... Calhoun divorced the idea of states' rights from natural rights, and invented the doctrine of legal or constitutional 'secession' to replace the natural right of revolution as the ground for independence. The South understood that to appeal to the right of revolution, as Jefferson had in the Declaration, was necessarily to appeal to the idea of individual natural rights. Southern leaders balked at such an appeal, because they understood that natural rights flew in the face of their fantastic justifications for slavery."

"There are so many monuments to the Confederacy in South Carolina's capital city that they are nearly impossible to avoid. Pinckney's body lay in state beside a statue of John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the seventh US vice president and a leading advocate of slavery. Calhoun was a shrewd politician, and one of the architects of secession from the Union, although he died in 1850, before he could see his secessionist theories implemented fully. In 1838 Calhoun wrote, "Many in the South once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world." He helped propel the United States into its devastating civil war, and in South Carolina, he is revered by some as a hero."

"Stephens' Constitutional View of the War Between the States, which was and remains probably the best defense of the Confederate cause. It is all about states' rights, and the defense of the minority against the tyranny of the numerical majority, although the 'silent minority', the four million slaves, are never counted. It is substantially the book that Calhoun would have written had he been alive to do so... Calhoun was the philosopher-king of the old south, the spiritual mentor of Stephens, Davis, and most of the political leaders of the Confederacy. Bradford and McClellan, following Willmoore Kendall, are obsessed with the utterly false notion that Lincoln was somehow responsible for the permissive egalitarianism of the contemporary welfare state. But equality as such was no less important to Calhoun than to Lincoln. It was just a different kind of equality... It never occurs to Calhoun that black human beings might also resent, with equal, or much greater, reason, 'acknowledged inferiority'. That is because he does not think of them as human. Calhoun simply assumes that blacks have neither the reason nor the passions that are characteristically human. They are chattels, that is, cattle, for all intents and purposes."

"There has always been in the South that intellectual elite who saw the Negro problem clearly. They have always lacked and some still lack the courage to stand up for what they know is right. Nevertheless they can be depended on in the long run to follow their own clear thinking and their own decent choice. Finally even the politicians must eventually recognize the trend in the world, in this country, and in the South. James Byrnes, that favorite son of this commonwealth, and Secretary of State of the United States, is today occupying an indefensible and impossible position; and if he survives in the memory of men, he must begin to help establish in his own South Carolina something of that democracy which he has been recently so loudly preaching to Russia. He is the end of a long series of men whose eternal damnation is the fact that they looked truth in the face and did not see it; John C. Calhoun, Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman are men whose names must ever be besmirched by the fact that they fought against freedom and democracy in a land which was founded upon democracy and freedom. Eventually this class of men must yield to the writing in the stars. That great hypocrite, Jan Smuts, who today is talking of humanity and standing beside Byrnes for a United Nations, is at the same time oppressing the black people of South Africa to an extent which makes their two countries, South Africa and the American South, the most reactionary peoples on earth. Peoples whose exploitation of the poor and helpless reaches the last degree of shame. They must in the long run yield to the forward march of civilization or die."

"Arguably the most prominent and accomplished of these planter-politicians was John Calhoun...On this defense of the prerogatives of the Southern section of the nation, Calhoun built an entire theory of government. Seeing the threat democracy posed to slavery, he set out to limit democracy...The problem, in Calhoun's eyes, was that the will of the majority, as expressed in the House of Representatives and the election of the president, had too much power. It had to be curbed, lest it overrun this "true and perfect voice of the people." And those "people" whose voices must be heard, of course, were those like him. Those with power. Those with property. Those who enslaved others."

"Chris Cillizza: If there is a list of the 15 greatest senators ever, is McCain on it? Why or why not? Ross Baker: He’s not up there with [[Henry Clay|[Henry] Clay]], [[Daniel Webster|[Daniel] Webster]], [John] Calhoun, [[Charles Sumner|[Charles] Sumner]] and LBJ, but he’s a lot closer than Ted Cruz will ever be. Few senators in recent years, however, have had such a stupendous sendoff. He always had the media eating out of his hand. That’s no minor accomplishment."

"Calhoun's last speech had a bitter attack on Mr. Jefferson for his amendment to the Ordinance of '87 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory. Calhoun was in a dying condition – was too weak to read it. So James M. Mason, a Virginia Senator, read it in the Senate about two weeks before Calhoun's death, March 1850."

"John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson's former vice president and eventual U.S. senator from South Carolina, argued against incorporation, asserting that Mexicans represented an amalgamation of "impure races, not [even] as good as the Cherokees or Choctaws." Calhoun asked, "Can we incorporate a people so dissimilar to us in every aspect-so little qualified for free and popular government-without certain destruction to our political institutions?""

"It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled to liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people too ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or of enjoying it. Nor is it any disparagement to liberty, that such is, and ought to be the case. On the contrary, its greatest praise—its proudest distinction is, that an all-wise Providence has reserved it, as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. A reward more appropriate than liberty could not be conferred on the deserving—nor a punishment inflicted on the undeserving more just, than to be subject to lawless and despotic rule."

"Such a state [of individual freedom and equality] is purely hypothetical. It never did, nor can exist; as it is inconsistent with the preservation and perpetuation of the race. It is, therefore, a great misnomer to call it the state of nature. Instead of being the natural state of man, it is, of all conceivable states, the most opposed to his nature—most repugnant to his feelings, and most incompatible with his wants. His natural state is, the social and political—the one for which his Creator made him, and the only one in which he can preserve and perfect his race. As, then, there never was such a state as the, so called, state of nature, and never can be, it follows, that men, instead of being born in it, are born in the social and political state; and of course, instead of being born free and equal, are born subject, not only to parental authority, but to the laws and institutions of the country where born, and under whose protection they draw their first breath."

"To the Infinite Being, the Creator of all, belongs exclusively the care and superintendence of the whole. He, in his infinite wisdom and goodness, has allotted to every class of animated beings its condition and appropriate functions; and has endowed each with feelings, instincts, capacities, and faculties, best adapted to its allotted condition. To man, he has assigned the social and political state, as best adapted to develop the great capacities and faculties, intellectual and moral, with which he has endowed him; and has, accordingly, constituted him so as not only to impel him into the social state, but to make government necessary for his preservation and well-being."

"The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and establishment of the new constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism."

"I assume, as an incontestable fact, that man is so constituted as to be a social being. His inclinations and wants, physical and moral, irresistibly impel him to associate with his kind; and he has, accordingly, never been found, in any age or country, in any state other than the social. In no other, indeed, could he exist; and in no other—were it possible for him to exist—could he attain to a full development of his moral and intellectual faculties, or raise himself, in the scale of being, much above the level of the brute creation. I next assume, also, as a fact not less incontestable, that, while man is so constituted as to make the social state necessary to his existence and the full development of his faculties, this state itself cannot exist without government. The assumption rests on universal experience. In no age or country has any society or community ever been found, whether enlightened or savage, without government of some description."

"I never know what South Carolina thinks of a measure. I never consult her. I act to the best of my judgment, and according to my conscience. If she approves, well and good. If she does not, or wishes any one to take my place, I am ready to vacate. We are even."