“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
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John F. Kennedy
“Freedom is being allowed to think your own thoughts and live your own life.”
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John F. Kennedy
“I'm shadowboxing in a match the shadow is always going to win. (as a young man battling his deceased brother's heroic legacy)”
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John F. Kennedy
“If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.”
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John F. Kennedy
“If this nation is to be wise as well as strong, if we are to achieve our destiny, then we need more new ideas for more wise men reading more good books in more public libraries. These libraries should be open to all—except the censor. We must know all the facts and hear all the alternatives and listen to all the criticisms. Let us welcome controversial books and controversial authors. For the Bill of Rights is the guardian of our security as well as our liberty.
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John F. Kennedy
“Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.”
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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
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie — deliberate, contrived and dishonest — but the myth — persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.”
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John F. Kennedy
“We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable."
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John F. Kennedy
“There are costs and risks to a program of action, but they are far less than the long range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.”
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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
“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
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John F. Kennedy
“And finally, at age seventy, having distinguished himself as a brilliant Secretary of State, an independent President and an eloquent member of Congress, he was to record somberly that his “whole life has been a succession of disappointments. I can scarcely recollect a single instance of success in anything that I ever undertook.”
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John F. Kennedy
“For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal.”
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John F. Kennedy
