Quotes
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Remarks Delivered Introducing Bill for Industrial Investment in Urban Poverty Areas, US Senate
The greatest failure in our existing anti-poverty efforts is the failure to involve and rely on the private enterprise system which is the basic strength of the nation. We have created for the poor a separate economy, almost a separate nation: a second-rate system of welfare handouts, a screen of government agency is keeping the…
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Address at the University of California, Berkeley Campus
Surely the world has seen enough, in the last forty years of violence and hatred. Surely we have seen enough of the attempt to justify present injustice by past slights, or to punish the unjust by making the world more unjust.
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Address at the University of California, Berkeley Campus
To understand the causes is not to permit the result. No man has the right to wantonly menace the safety and well-being of his neighbors. All citizens have the right to security in the streets of their community—in Birmingham or in Los Angeles. And it is the duty of all public officials to keep the…
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Address at the University of California, Berkeley Campus
The central disease of violence is what it does to all of us— to those who engage in it as much as to those who are its victims.
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Speech delivered at the 10th Anniversary Convocation for the Center for Study of Democratic Institutions of the Fund for the Republic, New York City
All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people—speaking out—in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out— in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes— let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.
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Speech at the International Water Quality Symposium, Washington, D.C.
We must clean up the streams and lakes. In addition to obvious reasons of health and recreation for doing so, the fact is that this is the most economical way to get at significant sources of water. The Hudson River pours 20 billion gallons a day into the Atlantic, all of which is too polluted…
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Address at the Greater Utica Chamber of Commerce, Utica, New York
Poverty leads to crime, to lowered general prosperity, to higher municipal costs and a lower tax base; and where it causes early school dropouts, broken families, and the shattering loss of hope itself, poverty is self-perpetuating and self-gene
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Speech in Chicago
The real problem of power, of the concentration of power, is not its existence, because we cannot wish it away. 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.
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Statement at the Federal Water Pollution Control Enforcement Conference for Moriches and Great South Bays Long Island, New York
As families move out of our cities into attractive towns and villages, they bring with them requirements that these small communities have not faced in the past.
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Address at Kentucky’s Centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, Freedom Hall, Louisville, Kentucky
The dilemma of poverty faced by the society and the polity is the gap between expectations and reality. Great expectations were the creation, not of idle political promises, but of the country itself and its history.
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Speech at the Dedication of the John F. Kennedy Interfaith Chapel at West Georgia College in Carrollton, Georgia
Opportunity denied or opportunity delayed—often one and the same—is not a question of color. One-tenth of our population is Negro. But a much larger portion of our total population, closer to one-fifth, is poor.
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