If government is to serve any purpose it is to do for others what they are unable to do for themselves.
Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or lose.
The test before us as a people is not whether our commitments match our will and our courage; but whether we have the will and courage to match our commitments.
Evil acts of the past are never rectified by evil acts of the present.
America has not always been kind to its artists and scholars. Somehow the scientists always seem to get the penthouse while the arts and humanities get the basement.
I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.
I want every family in America to have a carpet on the floor and a picture on the wall. After bread, you’ve got to have a picture on the wall.
All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today.
I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle.
Come now, let us reason together.
We have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.
We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding, in and close to our cities. In the backcountry we need to copy the great Appalachian Trail in all parts of America.
The American people have a right to air that they and their children can breathe without fear.
Doing the right thing is not the problem. Knowing what the right thing is, that’s the challenge.
Victory is no longer a truth. It is only a word to describe who is left alive in the ruins.
You know, doing what is right is easy. The problem is knowing what is right.
There’s America, there’s the South, and then there’s Mississippi.
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.
People do not come out to vote for a United States Senator. They come out to vote for the Sheriff or the County Commissioner.
Power is where power goes.
Already a congressman, to a mentor “I hope sometime you run across something you think I can do well 24 hours per day.