Politics ought to be the part-time profession of every citizen who would protect the rights and privileges of free people and who would preserve what is good and fruitful in our national heritage.
Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.
There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.
Though force can protect in emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.
Never waste a minute thinking about people you don't like.
The older I get the more wisdom I find in the ancient rule of taking first things first. A process which often reduces the most complex human problem to a manageable proportion.
There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.
Politics is a profession; a serious, complicated and, in its true sense, a noble one.
Ankles are nearly always neat and good-looking, but knees are nearly always not.
Pessimism never won any battle.
I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose.
If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field.
The problem in defense is how far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
Extremes to the right and to the left of any political dispute are always wrong.
When you are in any contest, you should work as if there were - to the very last minute - a chance to lose it. This is battle, this is politics, this is anything.
