Quotes By John F. Kennedy

For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.

The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House.

A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.

America has tossed its cap over the wall of space.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

When we got into office, the thing that surprised me most was to find that things were just as bad as we'd been saying they were.

The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

There are many people in the world who really don't understand-or say they don't-what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin!

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

I'm always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

Domestic policy can only defeat us; foreign policy can kill us.

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.

Communism has never come to power in a country that was not disrupted by war or corruption, or both.

There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.

I'm an idealist without illusions.