Robert Kennedy

Politician

1925-11-20

Quotes by Robert Kennedy

• Lack of education, old age, bad health or discrimination - these are causes of poverty, and the way to attack it is to go to the root.

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• Freedom possesses many meanings. It speaks not merely in terms of political and religious liberty but also in terms of economic and social progress.

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• The ultimate relationship between justice and law will be an eternal subject for speculation and analysis. But it may be said that in a democratic society, law is the form which free men give to justice.

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• There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.

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• One of the great creative statesmen of our age was Franklin Roosevelt. He was creative precisely because he preferred experiment to ideology.

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• Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.

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• If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom.

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• I have told friends and supporters who are urging me to run that I would not oppose President Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.

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• Everything that makes man's life worthwhile - family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head - all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people.

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• Since the days of Greece and Rome, when the word 'citizen' was a title of honor, we have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities.

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• Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort.

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• Tolerating organized crime promotes the cheap philosophy that everything is a racket. It promotes cynicism among adults. It contributes to the confusion of the young and to the increase of juvenile delinquency.

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• 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 a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

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• Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

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• 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.

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• It is the right of government to protect the weak; it is the right of the weak to find in their courts fair treatment before the law.

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• I believe indeterminate sentencing can be extremely useful, but I also believe that any such system should always take into consideration the special knowledge as to the facts in a case which only the trial judge possesses.

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• Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

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• The tyranny of Communism is as old as the Pharaohs and the Pyramids - that the State stands above all men and their individual aspirations.

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

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