Speeches
-
Solving the Urban Crisis: Testimony Before the Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization
Tags Share Each of our cities is now the seat of nearly all the problems of American life: poverty and race hatred, interrupted education and stunted lives, and other ills of the new urban nation—congestion and the filth, danger, and purposelessness which afflict all but the very rich and the very lucky. To speak of…
-
Reflections on the 1965 Watts Riots: State Convention, Independent Order of Odd Fellows
Tags Share I want to speak to you tonight about some of the events of the last week: about the dead and the orphans of the rioting in Los Angeles; about the sick and the distressed of all our urban ghettos; about the hatred and the fear and the brutality we saw in Los angeles;…
-
Address to the National Council of Christians and Jews
Tags Share The unfinished business at hand is the most difficult and dangerous that we have ever faced. Today’s problems of intolerance are harder than yesterday’s; tomorrow’s will be harder still. One reason for this difficulty is that racial intolerance is harder to combat than religious intolerance. Most people, after all, have to be told…
-
Speech at the Americans for Democratic Action Dinner
Tags Share When a hundred student body presidents and editors of college newspapers; hundreds of former Peace Corps volunteers; dozens of present Rhodes scholars—when these, the flower of our youth, question the basic premises of the war, they should not and cannot be ignored. Among these protesters, most will serve, if called upon, with courage…
-
Speech at the University of California at Berkeley
Tags Share 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 new ideas and bold projects. Rather it will belong to those who blend passion, reason, and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and…
-
Speech at the University of Mississippi Law School Forum
Tags Share Your generation—South and North, white and black—is the first with the chance not only to remedy the mistakes which all of us have made in the past but to transcend them. Your generation—this generation—cannot afford to waste its substance and its hope in the struggles of the past, for beyond these walls is…
-
Commencement Address at Queens College
Tags Share Around the world—from the Straits of Magellan to the Straits of Malacca, from the Nile delta to the Amazon basin, in Jaipur and Johannesburg—the dispossessed people of the world are demanding their place in the sun. For uncounted centuries, they have lived with hardship, with hunger and disease and fear. For the last…
-
Address at the California Institute of Technology
Tags Share Many years ago, Albert Einstein addressed the students of this institute. “It is not enough,” he said, “that you should understand about applied science in order that your work may increase man’s blessings.” And he added, “Concern for man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors,…
-
Remarks at a “Friendly Sons Dinner” in Scranton, Pennsylvania
Tags Share I’m aware, of course, of the notable number of sons of St. Patrick who live here in Scranton, and as a son of St. Patrick myself, I know how friendly you’ve been—to President Kennedy in everything he did—and to me whenever I’ve been here. So I think of these things in addition to…
-
Testimonial Dinner for John Reynolds
Tags Share We are not in the midst of another political campaign. Elections remind us not only of the rights but the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy. Yet we live in a time when the individual’s opportunity to meet his responsibilities appears circumscribed by impersonal powers beyond his influence. On the surface the individual…
-
The United States and the New Forces of the World
Tags Share The outstanding spirit abroad in the world today is nationalism—nationalism closely linked with anti-colonialism. Nationalism itself, of course, is nothing new. This self-determination performed the essential function of giving people an identity with their country and with each other. It became in some societies not merely an article of faith and common aspiration—but…
-
Lecture to faculty and students at Nihon University
Tags Share Young men and women of my age in all countries, if they share nothing else, share the problems that torment our world and thus share responsibilities for all our futures. Our generation was born during the turmoil following the first World War. That war marked the dividing line—at least for the Western World—between…
Share