Quotes from John F. Kennedy

Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

I believe in an America where the separation of Church and State is absolute—where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be a Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote—where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference.

Too often we hold fast to the clichés of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. [Commencement Address at Yale University, June 11 1962]

Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and commerce.

No one has been barred on account of his race from fighting or dying for America—there are no "white" or "colored" signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party's candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.

Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.

We must use time as a tool, not as a couch.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are. The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.

I don't think the intelligence reports are all that hot. Some days I get more out of the New York Times.

If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.

Israel was not created in order to disappear - Israel will endure and flourish. It is the child of hope and the home of the brave. It can neither be broken by adversity nor demoralized by success. It carries the shield of democracy and it honors the sword of freedom.

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.

I'm always rather nervous about how you talk about women who are active in politics, whether they want to be talked about as women or as politicians.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

I look forward to a great future for America - a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.