John F. Kennedy Quotes
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We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.
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Only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.
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Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.
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Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.
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Khrushchev reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger's skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas.
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I hope that your Government will refrain from any action which would widen or deepen this already grave crisis and that we can agree to resume the path of peaceful negotiation.
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For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
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Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.
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Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
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In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than in mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.
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I want to drink a cup of tea to all those Kennedys who went and all those Kennedys who stayed.
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And Prince Bismarck was even more specific. One third, he said, of the students of German universities broke down from overwork, another third broked down from dissipation, and the other third ruled Germany.
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There is danger that totalitarian governments, not subject to vigorous popular debate, will underestimate the will and unity of democratic societies where vital interests are concerned.
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Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was 'civis Romanus sum.' Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'
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We live under majority rule and if that majority is not well educated in its responsibilities, the whole Nation suffers.
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We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
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The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.
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Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.
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The peace-keeping machinery of the United Nations cannot work without the help of the smaller nations, nations whose forces threaten no one and whose forces can thus help create a world in which no nation is threatened. Great powers have their responsibilities and their burdens, but the smaller nations of the world must fulfill their obligations as well.
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This knowledge, the knowledge that the physical well-being of the citizen is an important foundation for the vigor and vitality of all the activities of the nation, is as old as Western civilization itself.
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Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.
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No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America, there are no white or colored signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.
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Their platform, made up of left-over Democratic planks, has the courage of our old convictions. Their pledge is a pledge to the status quo - and today there can be no status quo.
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There are those who regard this history of past strife and exile as better forgotten. But, to use the phrase of Yeats, let us not casually reduce 'that great past to a trouble of fools.' For we need not feel the bitterness of the past to discover its meaning for the present and the future.