“Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.”

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

The greatest truth must be recognition that in every man, in every child is the potential for greatness.

Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don’t. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

You knew that what is given or granted can be taken away, that what is begged can be refused; but that what is earned is kept.

GNP measures neither our courage, our wisdom neither our compassion. It measures everything except what makes life worthwhile

The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present.

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves.

What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.

Nations around the world look to us for the leadership not merely by strength of arms but by strength of our convictions.

Men and women with freed minds may often be mistaken, but they are seldom fooled. They may be influenced, but they cannot be intimidated. They may be perplexed, but they will never be lost.

I think there is an obligation on the part of all of us to stay informed and aware.

The sharpest criticism often goes hand in hand with the deepest idealism and love of country.