Law is the great civilizing machinery. It liberates the desire to build and subdues the desire to destroy.
A President must call on many persons--some to man the ramparts and to watch the far away, distant posts; others to lead us in science, medicine, education and social progress here at home.
Presidents quickly realize that while a single act might destroy the world they live in, no one single decision can make life suddenly better or can turn history around for the good.
We can and should have an abundance of trails for walking, cycling, and horseback riding, in and close to our cities. In the backcountry we need to copy the great Appalachian Trail in all parts of America.
History may well record that we served liberty and saved freedom when we undertook a crash program in the field of education . . .. I hope this bill is only the forerunner of better things to come.
I am persuaded that the people of the world have no grievances, one against the other. The hopes and desires of a man who tills the soil are about the same whether he lives on the banks of the Colorado or on the banks of the Danube.
Second, this law has become a special symbol of our Nation's most important purpose: to fulfill the individual - his freedom, his happiness, his promise.
I report to you that our country is challenged at home and abroad: that it is our will that is being tried and not our strength; our sense of purpose and not our ability to achieve a better America.
Europe has been at peace since 1945. But it is a restless peace thats shadowed by the threat of violence. Europe is partitioned. An unnatural line runs through the heart of a very great and a very proud nation [Germany]. History warns us that until this harsh division has been resolved, peace in Europe will never be secure. We must turn to one of the great unfinished tasks of our generationand that unfinished task is making Europe whole again.
The great society is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goods than with the quantity of their goods.
Today - wealthier, more powerful and more able than ever before in our history - our Nation can declare another essential freedom.
A President Roosevelt comes only once in a century. I believe God knew and does know of the need of the world at this moment. I don't believe President Roosevelt is an accident in time, or that it is an accident that he is President for a third time. I believe that Franklin D. Roosevelt truly is the voice of liberty in the world.
When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.
You have your own difficulties. We watch, with friendly confidence in your capacity to merge differences in the grand dream of Canadian design.
Freedom is not enough.
If there is one word that describes our form of society in America, it may be the word-voluntary.
Every gift contains a danger. Whatever gift we have we are compelled to express. And if the expression of that gift is blocked, distorted, or merely allowed to languish, then the gift turns against us, and we suffer.
Americans have always built for the future. That is why we established land grant colleges and passed the Homestead Act to open our Western lands more than 100 years ago.
The exercise of power in this century has meant for all of us in the United States not arrogance, but agony.
This Civil Rights Act is a challenge to all of us to go to work in our communities and our states, in our homes and in our hearts, to eliminate the last vestiges of injustice in our beloved country. So tonight I urge every public official, every religious leader, every business and professional man, every working man, every housewife - I urge every American - to join in this effort to bring justice and hope to all our people, and to bring peace to our land.
Not now, or not there, or too much, or not at all.
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
Now we may have more preachers out there than we have drinkers. But a fellow told me a story one time about a man down in Kentuckywhere they make bourbon. And he said you can take a jigger or two jiggers and get by all right. But if you try to take the whole bottle why you have lost what you started with. So don't try to take it too quick. And don't try to do all of it at once. I don't do much promising. I tell what my goals are and then I try to wrap it up and put a blue ribbon on it and get it delivered. We say put the coonskin on the wall.
We preach the virtues of democracy abroad. We must practice its duties here at home. Voting is the first duty of democracy.
If the purpose of lamentation be to excite pity, it is surely superfluous for age and weakness to tell their plaintive stories; for pity presupposes sympathy, and a little attention will show them, that those who do not feel pain seldom think that it is felt.
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