J. William Fulbright Quotes

I talk about my dad and the American dream, and I just want to say to Americans how fascinated we are by America. We would love Americans to look at the rest of the world that way sometimes.

Of all the joint ventures in which we might engage, the most productive, in my view, is educational exchange. I have always had great difficulty-since the initiation of the Fulbright scholarships in 1946-in trying to find the words that would persuasively explain that educational exchange is not merely one of those nice but marginal activities in which we engage in international affairs, but rather, from the standpoint of future world peace and order, probably the most important and potentially rewarding of our foreign-policy activities.

Through the Young Men's Christian Association and principally in Australia and North America, as well as in South America, I came into contact with families of these countries.

The most important thing for me is to have real friendship between Egyptians and Americans.

The world is far more interconnected today. Hence the need to understand each other is greater than ever before.

I want England to understand - the rest of the world to understand - what is going on in America. And I want America to understand what is going on in the rest of the world.

Hopefully the presence in Congress of an American who happens to be Hindu will increase America's understanding of India as well as India's understanding of America.

Believing in each culture's right to be understood by the other party without any form of falseness or distortion is paramount.

Travel teaches tolerance.

We Americans have an obligation to come to China, to learn more about China. Why? Because with each passing day, it's going to be more and more in our future.

My American undergraduate education probably gave me a better idea of the fundamentals of what European civilization is about, better than the undergraduate education you get at most European universities.

When you go out of your country and meet people, you get a wider perspective.

It's important that we have a global perspective and look abroad and learn from our neighbors.

I absolutely do believe that we need to not be so myopic. We ought to throw open widely the windows on the world in order to learn more about it.

I understand different cultures because I have travelled a lot.

Educational exchange can turn nations into people, contributing as no other form of communication can to the humanizing of international relations

The 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.

If the various groups in America had been less selfish and had permitted different representatives from the groups to travel into foreign countries, and broaden their own scope, and come back and educate the movements they represented, not only would this have made the groups to which they belonged more enlightened and more worldly in the international sense, but it also would have given the independent African states abroad a better understanding of the groups in the United States, and what they stand for, what they represent.

We have very close humanitarian contacts [with China], wide-ranging youth exchanges, educational and regional contacts, and all of them continue to develop.

If the people of the United States come to Iran and see its ancient history and nature of Iran, and the people of Iran go to the United States to see America, this can shorten the walls of mistrust and improve the situation for the future.

I really think it's extremely important for Americans to better understand China. And by better, I mean don't just read their lines. You've got to dig down to find out what's going on, and come over, see China.

In your generation, everybody is constantly bombarded with all kinds of different input from different cultures, and that's a strength, that's a positive thing. That's why I remain confident about America's ability to compete in the world, precisely because we've got a little bit of everybody in this country.

As the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry.

In America we have across the country, the entire world.

So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.