Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is historically and biologically true that there can be no birth and growth without birth and growing pains. Whenever there is the emergence of the new we confront the recalcitrance of the old. So the tensions which we witness in the world today are indicative of the fact that a new world order is being born and an old order is passing away.

Government action is not the whole answer to the present crisis, but it is an important partial answer. Morals cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. The law cannot make an employer love me, but it can keep him from refusing to hire me because of the color of my skin.

“The absurd . . . the fact that with God all things are possible.” The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.

Truth Is Subjectivity.

Owe your banker ₤1,000 and you are at his mercy; owe him ₤1 million and the position is reversed.

It is quite true what Philosophy says: that Life must be understood backwards. But that makes one forget the other saying: that it must be lived—forwards.

If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again . . . there need be no more unemployment.

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyment and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.

A “sound” banker, alas! is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.

The important thing for Government is not to do things which individuals are doing already, and to do them a little better or a little worse; but to do those things which at present are not done at all.

I believe that in many cases the ideal size for the unit of control and organization lies somewhere between the individual and the modern State. I suggest, therefore, that progress lies in the growth and the recognition of semi-autonomous bodies within the State.

Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.

Professor [Max] Planck of Berlin, the famous originator of the Quantum Theory, once remarked to me that in early life he had thought of studying economics, but had found it too difficult!

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.

He [Clemenceau] had one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind, including Frenchmen.

I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Jack speaks to Alan (in a letter written and mailed here) about the “beat generation,” the “generation of furtives.”

The most true path of the planet [Mars] is an ellipse, which Dürer also calls an oval, or certainly so close to an ellipse that the difference is insensible.

I write the book, to be read, either now or by posterity. Which, I care not. It may well wait a century for a reader, as long as God waited six thousand years for a discoverer.

[ Of the Bay of Pigs invasion :] All my life I’ve known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?

[ Responding to the question, “How did you become a war hero?” :] It was involuntary. They sank my boat.

[ Remark to advisers after United States Steel raised prices on the heels of a labor settlement negotiated by Kennedy, 12 Apr. 1962 :] My father always told me that all business men were sons-of-bitches but I never believed it till now!

[ On the appointment of his brother Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general :] I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.

Yesterday a shaft of light cut into the darkness. . . . For the first time, an agreement has been reached on bringing the forces of nuclear destruction under international control.

The definition of happiness of the Greeks . . . is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.

We are prepared to discuss a détente affecting NATO and the Warsaw pact.

Every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated. But this is not the case.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.

Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It’s very hard in military or in personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair.

Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.

I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.

First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

[ Referring to the Bay of Pigs disaster :] There’s an old saying that victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan.

In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it.

The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.

If a beach-head of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved. All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

For those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us—recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state—our success or failure, in whatever office we hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions: First, were we truly men of courage. . . . Secondly, were we truly men of judgment. . . . Third, were we truly men of integrity. . . . Finally, were we truly men of dedication.

To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge—to convert our good words into good deeds—in a new alliance for progress—to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.

We do not campaign stressing what our country is going to do for us as a people. We stress what we can do for the country.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the Nineteen Sixties—the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and unfilled threats. . . . The New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer to the American people, but what I intend to ask of them.

This is not a time to keep the facts from the people—to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”

The test of a democracy is not the magnificence of buildings or the speed of automobiles or the efficiency of air transportation, but rather the care given to the welfare of all the people.

I always made an awkward bow.

Among the many things he [Keats] has requested of me to-night, this is the principal one,—that on his grave-stone shall be this,—HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER.

When old age shall this generation waste,

Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,