This world demands the qualities of youth; not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the life of ease.
Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.
Fear not the path of Truth for the lack of People walking on it.
Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection.
Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
I’m tired of chasing people.
You’re happiest while you’re making the greatest contribution.
Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.
He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.
Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Every time you stand up for an ideal, you send forth a tiny ripple of hope.
If our constitution had followed the style of Saint Paul, the First Amendment might have concluded: “But the greatest of these is speech.” In the darkness of tyranny, this is the key to the sunlight. If it is granted, all doors open. If it is withheld, none.
Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.