Quotes from Robert Kennedy

Your life can be anything you want it to be.

No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.

This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.

To the extent that laws are founded on morality and on logic, they can lead men's hearts and minds.

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

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.

GNP measures neither our courage, our wisdom neither our compassion. It measures everything except what makes life worthwhile

There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

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

What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet...

The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.

We must continue to prove to the world that we can provide a rising standard of living for all men without loss of civil rights or human dignity to any man.

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.

Some men see what is, and ask 'Why?' I see what might be, and ask 'Why Not?'

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

When I was counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, about 25% of the important leads which our committee developed came from newspapers. This increased my respect for those courageous newspapers which assisted us. It also caused me to look with wonderment at some of the newspapers that did not.

Good union leaders make excellent public leaders in the legislative and executive branches.

The eradication of racial and religious prejudice in the United States - and in the rest of the world as well - is a long-term process.

Men and women with freed minds may often be mistaken, but they are seldom fooled. They may be influenced, but they cannot be intimidated. They may be perplexed, but they will never be lost.

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

Every American has the duty to obey the law and the right to expect that the law will be enforced.

Lawyers have their duties as citizens, but they also have special duties as lawyers. Their obligations go far deeper than earning a living as specialists in corporation or tax law. They have a continuing responsibility to uphold the fundamental principles of justice from which the law cannot depart.

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.