Character, self-discipline, determination, attitude and service are the substance of life.
I have always believed that I could help change the world, because I have been lucky to have adults around me who did.
To all those mothers and fathers who are struggling with teen-agers, I say, just be patient: even though it looks like you can’t do anything right for a number of years, parents become popular again when kids reach 20.
There are levels of outrage, and there’s a point at which you can’t be trespassed upon anymore.
Children cannot eat rhetoric and they cannot be sheltered by commissions. I don’t want to see another commission that studies the needs of kids. We need to help them.
It is a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.
So often we think we have got to make a difference and be a big dog. Let us just try to be little fleas biting. Enough fleas biting strategically can make a big dog very uncomfortable.
Ordinary women of grace are, in a sense, my real role models.
Our true remembrance to President Kennedy is in our actions to honor the unspoken words and finish the unfinished work today and tomorrow and for as long as it takes.
Remember and help America remember that the fellowship of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and gender in a democratic society.
So much of the deep lingering sadness over President Kennedy’s assassination is about the unfinished promise: unspoken speeches, unfulfilled hopes, the wondering about what might have been.
Somehow we are going to have to develop a concept of enough for those at the top and at the bottom so that the necessities of the many are not sacrificed for the luxuries of the few.
Let all children come unto me.
So much of America’s tragic and costly failure to care for all its children stems from our tendency to distinguish between our own children and other people’s children – as if justice were divisible.
There should not be one new dime in tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires as long as millions of children in America are poor, hungry, uneducated and without health coverage.
Don’t be afraid of hard work.
The old notion that children are the private property of parents dies very slowly. In reality, no parent raises a child alone. How many of us nice middle-class folk could make it without our mortgage reduction.
When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
Amidst protestations of ‘Who can be against the children?’ too few people are FOR children when it really matters.
Hunger and malnutrition have devastating consequences for children and have been linked to low birth weight and birth defects, obesity, mental and physical health problems, and poorer educational outcomes.