“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.”
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John F. Kennedy
“I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, "rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation"—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.
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John F. Kennedy
“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Children are the world's most valuable resource and its best hope for the future.”
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John F. Kennedy
“The stories of past courage can define that ingredient- they can teach, they can offer hope, they can provide inspiration. But they cannot provide courage itself. For this each man must look into his own soul.”
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John F. Kennedy
“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.
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John F. Kennedy
“What makes journalist so fascinating, and biography so interesting [is] the struggle to answer that single question: 'What's he like?”
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John F. Kennedy
“No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down, and all of us are made better off whenever any one of us is made better off.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Perhaps the twentieth-century Senator is not called upon to risk his entire future on one basic issue in the manner of Edmund Ross or Thomas Hart Benton. Perhaps our modern acts of political courage do not arouse the public in the manner that crushed the career of Sam Houston and John Quincy Adams. Still, when we realize that a newspaper that chooses to denounce a Senator today can reach many thousand times as many voters as could be reached by all of Daniel Webster’s famous and articulate detractors put together, these stories of twentieth-century political courage have a drama, an excitement—and an inspiration—all their own.”
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John F. Kennedy
“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
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John F. Kennedy