Today our problem is not making miracles, but managing them.
New laboratories and centers will help our schools lift their standards of excellence and explore new methods of teaching. These centers will provide special training for those who need and deserve special treatment.
It will help at every state along the road to learning. For the pre-school years we will help needy children become aware of the excitement of learning.
In addition to our existing programs, I will recommend a new program for schools and students with a first-year authorization of $1,500 million.
In a nation of millions and a world of billions, the individual is still the first and basic agent of change.
A clear stream, a long horizon, a forest wilderness and open sky – these are man’s most ancient possessions. In a modern society, they are his most priceless.
It’s the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done.
There is no excuse-and we should call a spade a spade-for chemical companies and oil refineries using our major rivers as pipelines for toxic waste. There is no excuse for communities to use other people’s rivers as a dump for their raw sewage.
Americans have always built for the future. That is why we established land grant colleges and passed the Homestead Act to open our Western lands more than 100 years ago.
The poor suffer twice at the rioter’s hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.
At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.
The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.
The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of disuse of the law.
Never make a speech at a country dance or a football game.
I cannot say and no man could say that no more will be asked of us.
Every American citizen must have an equal right to vote. There is no reason which can excuse the denial of that right. There is no duty which weighs more heavily on us than the duty we have to ensure that right.
One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.
The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends.
As we maintain the vigil of peace, we must remember that justice is a vigil, too-a vigil we must keep in our own streets and schools and among the lives of all our people-so that those who died here on their native soil shall not have died in vain.
Peace does not come just because we wish for it. Peace must be fought for. It must be built stone by stone.