“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?”

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.

We know that if one man’s rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.

Send forth a tiny ripple of hope.

A life without criticism is not worth living.

If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.

There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of the comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

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.

It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.

The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.