To criticize one’s country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing. „This,“ said Albert Camus in one of his „Letters to a German Friend,“ is „what separated us from you; we made demands. You were satisfied to serve the power of your nation and we dreamed of giving ours her truth…“

—Senator J. William Fulbright

My dad had the Fulbright quote up on the wall over his desk in our home during Vietnam, when I was young, and I posted it over my own desk years later, after America’s Second Gulf War, hoping it would inspire my son as it had inspired me. It’s the first paragraph in Fulbright’s 1966 The Arrogance of Power. Part I, The Higher Patriotism, begins with Chapter 1, The Citizen and the University. I read The Arrogance of Power in the mid 1970s, before I had any experience of university. Fulbright continues

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste but its effect, not how it makes people feel at the moment but how it makes them feel and moves them to act in the long run.