Robert F. Kennedy Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert F. Kennedy
The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.

Robert F. Kennedy
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

Robert F. Kennedy
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

Robert F. Kennedy
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Robert F. Kennedy
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

Robert F. Kennedy
About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

Robert F. Kennedy
Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

Robert F. Kennedy
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.

Robert F. Kennedy
Courage is the most important attribute of a lawyer.… It should pervade the heart, the halls of justice, and the chambers of the mind.

Robert F. Kennedy
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Robert F. Kennedy
We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.

Robert F. Kennedy
Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.

Robert F. Kennedy
The road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important for all to understand - though all change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.

Robert F. Kennedy
This world demands the qualities of youth: not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease.

Robert F. Kennedy
If communist unions ever gain a position to exercise influence in the transport lanes of the world, the free world will have suffered a staggering blow.

Robert F. Kennedy
I think there is an obligation on the part of all of us to stay informed and aware.

Robert F. Kennedy
Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.

Robert F. Kennedy
And a third danger is timidity. Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality of those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.

Robert F. Kennedy
Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

Robert F. Kennedy
Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny. There is pride in that, even arrogance, but there is also experience and truth. In any event, it is the only way we can live.

Robert F. Kennedy
Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far-off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire whatever weapons and ammunition they desire.

Robert F. Kennedy
All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

Robert F. Kennedy
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

Robert F. Kennedy
When there were periods of crisis, you stood beside him. When there were periods of happiness, you laughed with him. And when there were periods of sorrow, you comforted him.

Robert F. Kennedy
I believe that in this generation those with the courage to enter the conflict will find themselves with companions in every corner of the world.

Robert F. Kennedy
Gross national product…measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.

Robert F. Kennedy
The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use — of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.

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

Robert F. Kennedy
I think that we could agree on what kind of a world we would all want to build. it would be a world of independent nations, moving toward international community, each of which protected and respected the basic human freedoms. It would be a world which demanded of each government that it accept its responsibility to insure social justice. It would be a world of constantly accelerating economic progress — not material welfare as an end in itself, but as a means to liberate the capacity of every human being to pursue his talents and to pursue his hopes. It would, in short, be a world that we would be proud to have built.

Robert F. Kennedy