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John F Kennedy Quotes

Browse 21 quotes about John F Kennedy.

John F Kennedy Quotes

“El Yauco is the mountain that stands across the Baluarte from Rosario. The top of it looks like the profile of John F. Kennedy in repose. The only flaw in this geographic wonder is that the nose is upside-down. Once, when Jaime and I had painfully struggled to the summit to investigate the nose, we found this message: MOTHER NATURE HAS NO RESPECT FOR YANQUI PRESIDENTS EITHER!”

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Book:Six Kinds of Sky: A Collection of Short Fiction
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“Almost fifty years ago, John F. Kennedy made this appeal: 'Too many of us think [that peace] is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view ... Let us focus instead on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions - on a series of concrete actions and effective agreements which are in the interest of all concerned. There is no single, simple key to this peace; no grand or magic formula to be adopted by one or two powers. Genuine peace must be the product of many nations, the sum of many acts. It must be dynamic, not static, changing to meet the challenge of each new generation. For peace is a process - a way of solving problems.' (Close quote.)”

HopePeaceOptimismComplexityConflict ResolutionJohn F KennedyPeace Process
Book:The Five Percent: Finding Solutions to Seemingly Impossible Conflicts
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“A rising sun died in America and the world on Nov. 22, 1963. Some say that we have never again seen such a rising sun in the sky as we did that morning. Even if it was cloudy or raining that day, the country and world were more innocent and optimistic at that moment than they have been since then. Some say that a piece of all of us – the hope that helps us get through another day - died that day. Others say the act just opened the eyes of many about what the U.S. government and other governments had done in our names for a long time.”

American PoliticsU S HistoryJfkJohn F KennedyJfk AssassinationJfk ConspiracyAmerican PresidentsPolitical Assassinations
Book:Death of the Rising Sun: A Search for Truth in the JFK Assassination
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“It is a national tragedy of incalculable proportions....What is wrong with the United States that it can provide the environment for such an act? There is sickness in the nation when political differences cannot be accepted and settled in the democratic way. (from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch)”

AssassinationPolitics Of The United StatesJohn F Kennedy
Book:Four Days: The Historical Record of the Death of President Kennedy
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“The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings...Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe...no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of "clear and present danger," then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent...For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”

GovernmentPastPresidentFutureSpeechUsaOppositionPresentSecrecyRuthlessHideCovertClandestineJfkJohn F KennedySecret SocietiesU S PresidentOpposedShadow GovernmentU S Government1961April 27 1961Secreat OathsSecret Society Speech
Author:President John F. Kennedy
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“Anyone who studies this evidence with an open mind understands that there was a coup in America in 1963, and that the plot was cleverly designed in an attempt to blame the assassination of President Kennedy on both Fidel Castro’s Cuba, and the Soviet Union, at the same time.”

JfkCuban Missile CrisisAnti CommunismBay Of PigsJohn F KennedyAssassination PlotJfk AssassinationJfk ConspiracyAnticommunismMilitary Coups
Book:JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated
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“Equality in America has never meant literal equality of condition or capacity. There will always be inequalities in character and ability in any society. Equality has meant rather that in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." It is meant that in a democratic society there should be no inequalities in opportunities or in freedoms.”

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Book:A Nation Of Immigrants
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“She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”

HistoryJfkJohn F KennedyJacqueline Kennedy OnassisRose Kennedy
Book:An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963
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“Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." In the same sense we cannot really speak of a particular immigrant contribution to America, because All Americans have been immigrants or the decedents of immigrants, even the Indians as mentioned before, migrated to the American continent. We can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer.”

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Book:A Nation Of Immigrants
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“The left denounces Kennedy for invading Cuba as casually as the right denounces him for invading it too timidly. One side sees Kennedy’s 'betrayal' and the other sees his 'failure to understand the situation.' The idea that the actual policy as carried out was the free synthesis of a totally absorbing internal conflict over which neither side had complete control does not seem to be widely entertained.”

CubaJfkKennedyBay Of PigsJohn F Kennedy
Author:Carl Oglesby
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“...the attitude of the Joint Chiefs after the Missile Crisis was precisely what one might imagine, given the above events: ’We told you so; you failed to follow our advice and allowed this catastrophe to happen; you then failed in your duty to cleanse Cuba of Communist influence and an undeniable military threat to the United States by force, when presented with the perfect justification for war; and in doing so, you have proven yourself unfit to be President.’ In my view, the foregoing events — revealed by the Northwoods documents — are the Rosetta Stone to the Kennedy assassination. It is my opinion that the great disfavor with which the hawks (i.e., the overwhelming majority) in his own national security establishment viewed his eventual resolution to the coming Cuban Missile Crisis was the proximate cause of JFK’s assassination , one year later in Dallas.”

JfkCuban Missile CrisisBay Of PigsJohn F KennedyAssassination PlotJfk AssassinationJfk ConspiracyMilitary Coups
Book:JFK’s War with the National Security Establishment: Why Kennedy Was Assassinated
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“Before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the very word conspiracy was seldom used by most Americans. The JFK assassination was the seminal national event in the lives of the Baby Boomer generation. We’ve heard all the clichés about the loss of our innocence, and the beginning of public distrust in our government’s leaders, being born with the events of November 22, 1963, but there’s a good deal of truth in that. President Kennedy tapped into our innate idealism and inspired a great many people, especially the young, like no president ever had before. John F. Kennedy was vastly different from most of our elected presidents. He was the first president to refuse a salary. He never attended a Bilderberg meeting. He was the first Catholic to sit in the Oval Office, and he almost certainly wasn’t related to numerous other presidents and/or the royal family of England, as is often the case. He was a genuine war hero, having tugged an injured man more than three miles using only a life preserver’s strap between his teeth, after the Japanese had destroyed the boat he commanded, PT-109. This selfless act seems even more courageous when one takes into account Kennedy’s recurring health problems and chronic bad back. He was an intellectual and an accomplished author who wrote many of his memorable speeches. He would never have been invited to dance naked with other powerful men and worship a giant owl, as so many of our leaders do every summer at Bohemian Grove in California.”

PoliticsJfkJohn F Kennedy
Book:Hidden History: An Exposé of Modern Crimes, Conspiracies, and Cover-Ups in American Politics
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“The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived. Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations? The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy. We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”

HateViolenceAfrican AmericansBlacksPresident KennedyJfkJohn F KennedyAssassinations
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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