Robert F. Kennedy

Robert Francis Kennedy (20 November 1925 - 6 June 1968) American politician, Attorney General of the U.S. and Senator; brother of President John F. Kennedy

Sourced

• The problem of power is how to achieve its responsible use rather than its irresponsible and indulgent use— of how to get men of power to live for the public rather than off the public.
  • "I Remember, I Believe", The Pursuit of Justice (1964)

• Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
  • After winning his race for a seat in the US Senate. Esquire (April 1965)

• People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
  • While on a campaign "whistle stop tour" which reporters had dubbed "The Ruthless Cannonball."

• Aeschylus wrote: "In our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
  • In a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., upon hearing of his assasination while campaigning in Indianapolis (4 April 1968)

• Something about the fact that I made some contribution to either my country, or those who were less well off. I think back to what Camus wrote about the fact that perhaps this world is a world in which children suffer, but we can lessen the number of suffering children, and if you do not do this, then who will do this? I'd like to feel that I'd done something to lessen that suffering.
  • In an interview shortly before he was killed, responding to a question by David Frost about how his obituary should read.

Attributed

• All of us, from the wealthiest to the young children that I have seen in this country, in this year, bloated by starvation --- we all share one precious possesion, and that is the name American. It is not easy to know what that means. But, in part, to be an American means to have been an outcast and a stranger, to have come from the exiles' country, and to know that he who denies the outcast and the stanger still amongst us, he also denies America.

• All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

• As long as men are hungry, and their children uneducated, and their crops destroyed by pestilence, the American Revolution will have a part to play. As long as men are not free -- in their lives and in their opinions, their speech and their knowledge -- that long will the American Revolution not be finished.

• But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

• Each generation makes it's own accounting to its children.

• Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.

• Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

• I am not one of those who think that coming in second or third is winning.

• I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

• I thought they'd get one of us, but Jack, after all he's been through, never worried about it. I thought it would be me.

• I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.

• I'm tired of chasing people.

• If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

• It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

• It is more important to be of service than successful.

• It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.

• It is one thing to assure a man the legal right to eat in a restaurant; it is another thing to assure that he can earn the money to eat there.

• Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

• One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

• Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

• Our attitude toward immigration reflects our faith in the American ideal. We have always believed it possible for men and women who start at the bottom to rise as far as their talent and energy allow. Neither race nor place of birth should affect their chances.

• Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

• Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills— against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. "Give me a place to stand," said Archimedes,"and I will move the world." These men moved the world, and so can we all.

• The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.

• The advice "bomb them back to the Stone Age" may show that the speaker is already there himself, but it could, if followed, force all of us to join him.

• The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of American society.

• Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

• We in Government have begun to recognize the critical work which must be done at all levels—local, State and Federal—in ending the pollution of our waters.

• What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.

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

Misattributions

• 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?
  • Variant: "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?"
  • Though Kennedy stated that he was quoting George Bernard Shaw when he said this, he is often thought to have originated the expression, which actually paraphrases that of Shaw in his play Back To Methuselah : “You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, “Why not?".