If future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as it was created, not just as it looked when we got through with it.
We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.
The Secretary of Labor is in charge of finding you a job, the Secretary of the Treasury is in charge of taking half the money you make away from you, and the Attorney General is in charge of suing you for the other half.
Justice requires us to remember that when any citizen denies his fellow, saying, ‘His color is not mine,’ or ‘His beliefs are strange and different,’ in that moment he betrays America, though his forebears created this nation.
It is happily and kindly provided that in every life there are certain pauses, and interruptions, which force consideration upon the careless, and seriousness upon the light, points of time where one course of action ends and another begins.
This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.
If two men agree on everything, you may be sure that one of them is doing the thinking.
At the desk where I sit, I have learned one great truth. The answer for all our national problems – the answer for all the problems of the world – comes to a single word. That word is ‘education.‘
For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that is sleeping in the unplowed ground.
As man draws nearer to the stars, why should he not also draw nearer to his neighbor?
I am concerned about the whole man. I am concerned about what the people, using their government as an instrument and a tool, can do toward building the whole man, which will mean a better society and a better world.
Education is the key to opportunity in our society, and the equality of educational opportunity must be the birthright of every citizen.
Any man who’s not willing to take half a loaf in a negotiation, well, that man never went to bed hungry.
The best fertilizer for a piece of land is the footprints of its owner.
Today – wealthier, more powerful and more able than ever before in our history – our Nation can declare another essential freedom.
The job, of course, will never be finished. For a nation, as for an individual, education is a perpetually unfinished journey, a continuing process of discovery.
In the years since then, those four freedoms – freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear – have stood as a summary of our aspirations for the American Republic and for the world.
The experts spent a great deal of time and study working out a formula which would be fair to every State and fair to every county and fair to every child, and would put the education dollar where that dollar is needed most, now.
We decided that our first job was to help the schools serving the children from the very lowest income groups. Those families constitute the number one burden, the number one burden in this Nation on the school systems.
It means an educational system which does not simply equip the students to adjust to society, but which enables the student to challenge and to modify, and at times reject, if necessary, the received wisdom of his elders.