“So, let us not be blind to our differences--but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. 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 future. And we are all mortal.”
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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
“And so it is to the printing press--to the recorder of man's deeds, the keeper of his conscience, the courier of his news--that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with your help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.”
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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
“Never before has man had such capacity to control his own environment,...We have the power to make this the best generation of mankind in the history or the world - or make it the last.”
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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
“Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
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John F. Kennedy
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.”
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John F. Kennedy
“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.”
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John F. Kennedy
“World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement. And history teaches us that enmities between nations, as between individuals, do not last forever . . .”
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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
“All of us do not have equal talent, but all of us should have an equal opportunity to develop those talents.”
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John F. Kennedy
“probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius in this house except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone.”
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John F. Kennedy