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Kennedy Quotes

Browse 28 quotes about Kennedy.

Kennedy Quotes

“With the prospect of raids on London itself, U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy decamped. To the great disdain of many in London, he began conducting his ambassadorial affairs from his home in the country. Within the Foreign Office, a joke began to circulate: "I always thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”

“I see men assassinated around me every day. I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains, television souls and high school ideas. Kennedy himself was 9/10ths the way around the clock or he wouldn't have accepted such an enervating and enfeebling job -- meaning President of the United States of America. How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?”

“President John F. Kennedy’s Cigars On February 7, 1962, President Kennedy announced to his staff that he needed some help finding as many of the prestigious Cuban Petit Upmann cigars as possible. He let it be known that he would like to have 1,000 of these cigars by the next morning. Being the President of the United States, his wish was granted when, on the morning of February 8th, his Press Secretary Pierre Salinger came in and deposited 1,200 cigars on Kennedy’s desk. Smiling, Kennedy opened his desk, took out a document and signed it, banning importation of all Cuban-made products into the United States. Some years later when asked about that moment, Salinger said that there were actually 1,201 cigars.”

“Neither the fanatics nor the faint-hearted are needed. And our duty as a Party is not to our Party alone, but to the nation, and, indeed, to all mankind. Our duty is not merely the preservation of political power but the preservation of peace and freedom. So let us not be petty when our cause is so great. Let us not quarrel amongst ourselves when our Nation's future is at stake. Let us stand together with renewed confidence in our cause -- united in our heritage of the past and our hopes for the future -- and determined that this land we love shall lead all mankind into new frontiers of peace and abundance.”

“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.”

“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.”

“...Ironically, three decades later President Barack Obama introduced a universal health insurance bill modeled closely after the Carter bill. Mondale´s former aide Richard Moe wrote that Obamacare ¨bore a striking resemblance to Carter´s proposal three decades before."The legislation pass Congress in 2009 with the support of Senator Kennedy, by then diagnosed with fatal brain cancer. In retrospect, Kennedy´s refusal to support Carter´s incremental, catastrophic national health insurance bill in 1978-79 condemned the country to wait three decades for meaningful healthcare reform. By any measure, this was a tragedy for the country. ¨The miss opportunity,¨ Eizenstat later wrote, ¨haunts me to this day.”

“After it was all over, the Carter people were stunned by Kennedy´s conduct. Why? Why would the Kennedy crowd persist in defeat, knowing that their displays of rancor would only further weaken a Democratic president in the face of the Reagan challenge from the right? Well, Kennedy partisans hated to see all the romantic notion of the Kennedy mystique coming to an end. Camelot was dying, and most ignobly, at the hands of these crude Georgia boys. And on the other side of the equation, the Georgia boys could not fathom the animosity. They felt their man was not only a liberal and a populist but a politician of integrity and intelligence who had accomplished much in his few years in the White House. For the Georgians, Kennedy´s behavior at the convention was all about ego. As Jody Powell later said, ¨We neglected to take into account one of the obvious facets of Kennedy´s character, an almost childlike self-centeredness.¨”

“Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.”

“Secret agreements between the Saudis and various U.S. presidents dated back to the early postwar era and continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a pact between President Harry Truman and King Ibn Saud in 1947, the United States vowed to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it was attacked. Likewise, in 1963, President Kennedy sent a squadron of fighter jets to protect Saudi Arabia when Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to kill members of the Saudi royal family.”

“Love has an immense power. Love is the strongest creative force in life. Love is what makes life meaningful. But love has a very different kind of power compared to what we usually define as power. We are acquainted with the power of the ego, the power of violence, aggression and destructivity. The basic problem for humanity is that people do not grow. That is why we go on writing human history about people like Alexander the Great, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, The stout right-wing Christian Ronald Regan, who murdered Osho, one of the most intelligent spiritual teachers of the 20th century. Osho was elected by Time magazine as one of the most influential people of the 20th century. The murders of John F. Kennedy and Osho caused the United States to regress as a moral, sane and humane country. Initiated sources in the U.S. say that the decision to murder Osho was taken on the highest levels in the U.S and the Vatican. American magazine Elle wrote: "Like Socrates, Osho was considered a corrupter of the morals of young people. Like all true philosophers he demolished a belief system that produced only unhappiness, not joy."The Dalai Lama said: "Osho is an enlightened master who is working with all possibilities to help humanity overcome a difficult phase in developing consciousness.", Joseph Stalin, George W. Bush, who started a war on Iraq built on lies, and murdered 1 million men, women and children to privatize Iraq's oil and sell it at a bargain price to Western oil companies. In modern times, Benjamin Netanyahu is repeating the darkest time in human history that humanity has sworn never to repeat again, by creating a modern concentration camp where defenseless Palestinian men, women and children are killed every day with high-tech weapons. The Western countries look the other way, only saying that Israel has the right to defend itself. Jacob Wallenberg, owner of the Swedish war industry, and the Swedish fascist, racist and bourgeois government, exports weapons to Israel, in order to more effectively murder more women and children per day, Donald Trump is currently dismantling American democracy, education and freedom of speech and is introducing fascism and racism all over the world. These people have a power that is violence, aggression and destruction. It is a power that is against life. It is a power that is against existence. It is a power that is against God. These people are the real psychopaths, narcissists, criminals. who suffer from a deep-seated inferiority complex. History should be erased from these people. Children should not be forced to read about these people and their disgusting and destructive actions. History should be concerned with people like Buddha, Jesus Christ, Kabir, Lao Tzu, Socrates, Rabiya and Osho, who are men and women of love, They are the salt of the earth. These people also have a power, but that is a totally different kind of power, which creates. To be destructive is easy. No intelligence and awareness is needed to be destructive. But to create needs intelligence and awareness. To be creating can only be done by people, who experience love, joy, truth, freedom and beauty. To be creative means to be part of God, because God is the creator. To be creative means to be part of the creativity of God. That is the power of love. The man of love is always creative. Whatsoever he does is creative. And the man of creativity slowly learns about love. Start from love and let love become creativity in your life. Love is our center of being and creativity is our periphery. Love plus creativity is equal to religion.”

“It is not clear who will bring to the Whitehouse those useful commodities of vivid language, a sense of history and most important - a sense of humour, but Johnson himself will provide many other attributes. He is effective precisely because he is so determined, industrious, personal and even humourless, particularly in dealing with Congress. (…) Kennedy had a detached and even donnish willingness to grant a merit in the other fellow’s argument. Johnson is not so inclined to retreat and grants nothing in an argument, not even equal time. Ask not what you have done for Lyndon Johnson, but what you have done for him lately. This may not be the most attractive quality of the new administration but it works. The lovers of style are not too happy with the new administration, but the lovers of substance are not complaining.”