Robert Kennedy Quotes

Enjoy the top 194 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Robert Kennedy.

“What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyrs cause has ever been stilled by an assassins bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.”
— Robert Kennedy —

“What has violence ever accomplished? What has it ever created? No martyr's cause has ever been stilled by an assassin's bullet. No wrongs have ever been righted by riots and civil disorders. A sniper is only a coward, not a hero; and an uncontrolled or uncontrollable mob is only the voice of madness, not the voice of the people.”

— Robert Kennedy

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

— Robert Kennedy

Now I can go back to being ruthless again.

— Robert Kennedy

“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.”

— Robert Kennedy

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

— Robert Kennedy

“Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth - but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?”

— Robert Kennedy

The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.

— Robert Kennedy

“We must continue to prove to the world that we can provide a rising standard of living for all men without loss of civil rights or human dignity to any man.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Lack of education, old age, bad health or discrimination - these are causes of poverty, and the way to attack it is to go to the root.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Elections remind us not only of the rights but the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy.”

— Robert Kennedy

In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness - of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.

— Robert Kennedy

“It is the right of government to protect the weak; it is the right of the weak to find in their courts fair treatment before the law.”

— Robert Kennedy

“The eradication of racial and religious prejudice in the United States - and in the rest of the world as well - is a long-term process.”

— Robert Kennedy

“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 the comfortable security of the 19th century and the instability and flux of our own time.”

— Robert Kennedy

“We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people - whether majority or minority, or individual human beings - are 'expendable' in the cause of theory or of policy.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Every generation inherits a world it never made; and, as it does so, it automatically becomes the trustee of that world for those who come after. In due course, each generation makes its own accounting to its children.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Everything that makes man's life worthwhile - family, work, education, a place to rear one's children and a place to rest one's head - all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people.”

— Robert Kennedy

“I believe indeterminate sentencing can be extremely useful, but I also believe that any such system should always take into consideration the special knowledge as to the facts in a case which only the trial judge possesses.”

— Robert Kennedy

“If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.”

— Robert Kennedy

“In the cases that come before the Department of Justice involving a wide range of unlawful activities, we see repeated evidence of family and community failures.”

— Robert Kennedy

“One of the primary purposes of civilization - and certainly its primary strength - is the guarantee that family life can flourish in unity, peace, and order.”

— Robert Kennedy

“There has been far too much hypocrisy in the field of civil rights. It is easy enough to give rousing speeches or call for legislation which has no possibility of passage.”

— Robert Kennedy

Tolerating organized crime promotes the cheap philosophy that everything is a racket. It promotes cynicism among adults. It contributes to the confusion of the young and to the increase of juvenile delinquency.

— Robert Kennedy

“We know that freedom has many dimensions. It is the right of the man who tills the land to own the land; the right of the workers to join together to seek better conditions of labor; the right of businessmen to use ingenuity and foresight to produce and distribute without arbitrary interference in a truly competitive economy.”

— Robert Kennedy

“We know that we cannot live together without rules which tell us what is right and what is wrong, what is permitted and what is prohibited. We know that it is law which enables men to live together, that creates order out of chaos. We know that law is the glue that holds civilization together.”

— Robert Kennedy

“When I was counsel for the Senate Rackets Committee, about 25% of the important leads which our committee developed came from newspapers. This increased my respect for those courageous newspapers which assisted us. It also caused me to look with wonderment at some of the newspapers that did not.”

— Robert Kennedy

“While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.”

— Robert Kennedy

“This much is clear: violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.”

— Robert Kennedy

Goethe tells us in his greatest poem that Faust lost the liberty of his soul when he said to the passing moment, 'Stay, thou art so fair.

— Robert Kennedy

“He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he's telling the truth. He just doesn't recognize truth or falsehood.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Every time you stand up for an ideal, you send forth a tiny ripple of hope.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills ... Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man”

— Robert Kennedy

“The greatest truth must be recognition that in every man, in every child is the potential for greatness.”

— Robert Kennedy

“The natural state of a human being is dignity.”

— Robert Kennedy

Only those who have the courage to fail greatly achieve greatly.

— Robert Kennedy

I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and I have such strong feelings about what must be done.

— Robert Kennedy

“Victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future.”

— Robert Kennedy

Even government by the consent of the governed, as in our own Constitution, must be limited in its power to act against its people; so that there may be no interference with the right to worship, or with the security of the home; no arbitrary imposition of pains or penalties by officials high or low; no restrictions on the freedom of men to seek education or work or opportunity of any kind, so that each man may become all he is capable of becoming.

— Robert Kennedy

“People are selfish, but they can also be compassionate and generous, and they care about the country. But not when they feel threatened. That's why this is such a crucial time. We can go in either direction. But if we don't make a choice soon, it will be too late to turn things around. I think people are willing to make the right choice. But they need leadership. They're hungry for leadership.”

— Robert Kennedy

“All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Some men see what is, and ask 'Why?' I see what might be, and ask 'Why Not?'”

— Robert Kennedy

“It is an unfinished society that we offer the world-a society that is forever committed to change, to improvement and to growth, that will never stagnate in the certitude of ideology or the finalities of dogma.”

— Robert Kennedy

“Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that LSD can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.”

— Robert Kennedy

“It is not more bigness that should be our goal. We must attempt, rather, to bring people back to ... the warmth of community, to the worth of individual effort and responsibility ... and of individuals working together as a community, to better their lives and their children's future.”