Quotes By John F. Kennedy

Khrushchev reminds me of the tiger hunter who has picked a place on the wall to hang the tiger's skin long before he has caught the tiger. This tiger has other ideas.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.

It is an unfortunate fact that we can secure peace only by preparing for war.

We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch - we are going back from whence we came.

Leadership and learning are indispensable to each other.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

A child miseducated is a child lost.

Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

A young man who does not have what it takes to perform military service is not likely to have what it takes to make a living. Today's military rejects include tomorrow's hard-core unemployed.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

Too often we... enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.

We prefer world law in the age of self-determination to world war in the age of mass extermination.

The best road to progress is freedom's road.

Sure it's a big job; but I don't know anyone who can do it better than I can.