Quotes / John F. Kennedy

Quotes by Kennedy:

Lots of competition in your business, just like in mine. Just remember there’s always room for one more good one.

— Future President to then-aspiring actor Leonard Nimoy

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

— Inaugural address, January 20, 1961

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

— Inaugural address

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.

— Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 20, 1961

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

— Address to Latin American diplomats at the White House, March 13, 1962

We choose to go to the Moon... we choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.

— Rice Stadium Speech, September 12, 1962

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free. When all are free, then we can look forward to that day when this city will be joined as one and this country and this great Continent of Europe in a peaceful and hopeful globe. When that day finally comes, as it will, the people of West Berlin can take sober satisfaction in the fact that they were in the front lines for almost two decades.

All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words 'Ich bin ein Berliner.'

— "Ich bin ein Berliner" Speech, June 26, 1963

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask 'why not?'.

— Speech delivered to the Dail (Parliament of Ireland), June 28, 1963

We, in this country, in this generation, are — by destiny rather than by choice — the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of "peace on earth, good will toward men." That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: "except the Lord keep the city, the watchmen waketh but in vain."

— Kennedy's intended speech in Dallas, November 22, 1963

Quotes about Kennedy:

His parents were an academic team of elites;
Their goal was to raise the future human supreme.
He smelled like the future,
His words were like flowers,
And if you shook his hand
You'd make love to it for hours."

— The Real Brad Neely's take on JFK.

The world was shocked that fateful day
A young man's life was blown away, away, away
In Dallas 1 PM"

— Saxon, "Dallas 1 PM"

When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.

Why then, why there,
Why thus, we cry, did he die?
The heavens are silent.

What he was, he was:
What he is fated to become
Depends on us.

Remembering his death,
How we choose to live
Will decide its meaning.

When a just man dies,
Lamentation and praise,
Sorrow and joy, are one.

—W. H. Auden, Elegy for J.F.K

I told you that white boy was smooth — a little bit too smooth, for my money.

—Carter Wilson, The Butler

Cat: I thought you guys said Kennedy was a great Prez!
Kryten: He was.
Rimmer: He was also an inveterate womanizer. His affairs were legendary. They only came out after his death.
Kryten: Every man has his weak spot, his Achilles' Heel.
Rimmer: Kennedy's was just... higher up.

— Red Dwarf, "Tikka to Ride"

Although his promiscuity was known to court and press, the public was excluded from such irrelevancies in those civilised days. After all, he would soon be exhorting us to 'bear any burden' so that freedom, or something, might prevail in a 'twilight time.' I wonder who thought up that last phrase. I do know that he liked it far too much. But then his own fragile health was itself a kind of premature twilight. So why not share it? Cuba, Laos, Berlin, Vietnam—he would keep us in permanent crisis. Better night than twilight?

— Gore Vidal, Palimpsest

Mike: He had the mutant power of being a sleazy, womanizing politician that the public still loved.
Jay: That's the best mutant power of all.

—Half in the Bag on X-Men: Days of Future Past

[Screenwriter Nicholas] Meyer isn’t exactly subtle. Like his decision to name “Gorkon” so as to evoke “Gorbachev”, or even to give David Warner a Lincoln-esque beard, that final crisis in Camp Khitomer is intended to remind viewers of the Kennedy assassination. It’s an idealistic President about to be struck down in his prime, when the future offers untold potential. It has been argued that Kennedy’s “New Frontier” became Star Trek’s “Final Frontier”, and Kennedy casts a long shadow over the classic Star Trek television show...So it’s no surprise that Kirk’s final adventure ends with the hero managing to thwart an assassination with uncanny similarities to the Kennedy assassination.

—Darren Mooney on Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Two grassy knolls, but fading over time. 9/11 truthers have really stolen the thunder away from Kennedy truthers.... The great thing about JFK is that it posits all these cool conspiracy theories, but when it comes time to pin it on one dude (Tommy Lee Jones), there's no evidence of any sort. Kevin Costner is just like, 'Hey, this guy lied about his alias. He probably did it'...I hope there WERE gunmen on grassy knoll, and that LBJ was there, and that aliens were buried under the motorcade route. I want to believe everything terrible.

—Drew Magary, "A Field Guide to American Truthers"

Kennedy was James Bond. Reagan was Matlock. Love him or hate him, we win. Republicans can call Reagan 'their Kennedy' all they want, but it's like calling Miller High Life 'the champagne of beers.' It's why calling some "your Kennedy" will never really cut it, because our Kennedy... is Kennedy.

— Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher

The Kennedy administration was in many ways very similar to the Reagan administration—in policy and programs—but they did do one smart thing that was different: they sort of buttered up the intellectual class, as compared with the Reaganites, who just treated them with contempt...and the result is, Camelot has always had a very beautiful image. And somehow it's all succeeded in getting most of the population to believe the lies about Kennedy. I mean, even today you can go down to poor rural black areas in the South and find pictures of him on the walls. Kennedy's role in the Civil Rights Movement was not pretty. But somehow the imagery has succeeded, even if the reality was never there.

—Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power

A steady flow of novels and movies based loosely on the assassination, not to mention the endless preoccupation with the Kennedys in publications like the National Enquirer, has helped to maintain popular interest in this event and to reinforce conspiracy theories...Side by side with the official mythology of a beleaguered government threatened by riots, demonstrations, and unmotivated, irrational assassinations of public figures, a popular mythology has taken shape in the last thirty years that sees government as a conspiracy against the people themselves.

—Christopher Lasch, The Life of Kennedy’s Death

The American political historian K. A. Cuordileone wrote a good book a few years ago about the birth of this 'cult of toughness' in American foreign policy, in which she makes the point that it was essentially the invention of liberals in the Kennedy Administration—the Eisenhower and Truman people were more inclined to talk of 'duty'—who wanted to curb the suspicion that liberals were inclined to be effete....All of the arguments, the ones that led to the near-apocalypse in Cuba and, later, to Vietnam, were not about calculations made of interests and utility. They were about looking manly. Cuordileone quotes Lyndon Johnson in his retirement on the catastrophe of Vietnam, when he was still obsessed with the idea that, if he had withdrawn, his enemies—by whom he meant, notably, Robert Kennedy, a founding member of the real-man cult—would know that Johnson was, in his own words, 'a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine.'

—Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, "No More Mr. Tough Guy"

[My mother] only voted for one Democrat in her entire life and that was Kennedy because spoiler alert: we're Catholic.

—Stephen Colbert, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

— Lloyd Bentsen to Dan Quayle, 1988 US Vice-Presidential debate.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. His name right now happens to be Kennedy - let's shoot him, literally, before Christmas.

—Delaware State News editorial (October 18, 1963)

Kennedy will get his reward in hell.
Stevenson is going to die.
His heart will stop, stop, stop.
And he will burn, burn, burn

—Song by protesters against the visit of Adlai Stevenson in Dallas on October 24, 1963

Es una mala noticia.^Translation It is bad news

—Fidel Castro when learning about Kennedy's death

Kennedy died a tyrant's death. … He encouraged integration, which has the support of communism. He was a tyrant.

—President of the Memphis Citizens' Council Richard Ely told to the Nashville White Citizens' Council, before half of the room left in disgust

Individual modes of behavior had not changed, nor had extremism […] An Oklahoma City physician beamed at a grief-stricken visitor and said, “Good, I hope they got Jackie.” In a small Connecticut city a doctor called ecstatically across Main Street—to an internist who worshiped Kennedy—“The joy ride’s over. This is one deal Papa Joe can’t fix.” A woman visiting Amarillo, the second most radical city in Texas, was lunching in the restaurant adjacent to her motel when a score of rejoicing students burst in from a high school directly across the street. “Hey, great, JFK’s croaked!” one shouted with flagrant delight, and the woman, leaving as rapidly as she could, noticed that several diners were smiling back at the boy.

—William Manchester, Death of a President

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