“It’s the price of leadership to do the thing you believe has to be done at the time it must be done.”

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

I want real loyalty. I want someone who will kiss my ass in Macy’s window, and say it smells like roses.

The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.

Free speech, free press, free religion, the right of free assembly, yes, the right of petition. Well, they are still radical ideas.

In the Great Society, work shall be an outlet for mans interests and desires. Each individual shall have full opportunity to use his capacities in employment which satisfies personally and contributes generally to the quality of the Nations life.

Better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

It’s too bad, but the way American people are, now that they have all this capability, instead of taking advantage of it, they’ll probably just piss it all away.

But if future generations are to remember us more with gratitude than with sorrow, we must achieve more than just the miracles of technology. We must also leave them a glimpse of the world as God really made it, not just as it looked when we got through with it.

Democracy is a constant tension between truth and half-truth and, in the arsenal of truth, there is no greater weapon than fact.

All men are created equal’, ‘government by consent of the governed’, ‘give me liberty or give me death’. Well, those are not just clever words, or those are not just empty theories.

It is the genius of our Constitution that under its shelter of enduring institutions and rooted principles there is ample room for the rich fertility of American political invention.

If you have a mother-in-law with only one eye and she has it in the center of her forehead, don’t keep her in the living room.

Education will not cure all the problems of society, but without it no cure for any problem is possible.

Of course, I may go into a strange bedroom every now and then that I don’t want you to write about, but otherwise you can write everything.

The poor suffer twice at the rioter’s hands. First, his destructive fury scars their neighborhood; second, the atmosphere of accommodation and consent is changed to one of hostility and resentment.

If we must disagree, let’s disagree without being disagreeable.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not.

Anyone who believes what a cat tells him deserves all he gets.

Freedom will destroy itself if it is not exercised within some sort of moral framework, somebody of shared beliefs, some spiritual heritage transmitted through the Church, the family, and the school.

Believe in yourself, know that you are great. Keep taking steps forward CHOOSE to run into fate.

No nation was ever so virtuous as each believes itself, and none was ever so wicked as each believes the other.

Darling, look how far you’ve come do you truly believe you are unable to rise from the ashes and grow new wings.

I’m a big believer in winging it. I’m a big believer that you’re never going to find the perfect city travel experience or the perfect meal without a constant willingness to experience a bad one.

She was everything real in a world of make-believe.