“Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our nation whole.”

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.

To hunger for use and to go unused is the worst hunger of all.

I will not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.