Art is a nation’s most precious heritage. For it is in our works of art that we reveal to ourselves and to others the inner vision which guides us as a nation. And where there is no vision, the people perish.
If we are to live together in peace, we must come to know each other better.
I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order.
A man can take a little bourbon without getting drunk, but if you hold his mouth open and pour in a quart, he’s going to get sick on it.
If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: ‘President Can’t Swim.’
Doing what’s right isn’t the problem. It is knowing what’s right.
No national sovereignty rules in outer space. Those who venture there go as envoys of the entire human race. Their quest, therefore, must be for all mankind, and what they find should belong to all mankind.
Education is not a problem. Education is an opportunity.
Until justice is blind to color, until education is unaware of race, until opportunity is unconcerned with the color of men’s skins, emancipation will be a proclamation but not a fact.
We must open the doors of opportunity.
You aren’t learning anything when you’re talking.
A man without a vote is man without protection.
There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few that we can solve by ourselves.
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.