Quotes from John F. Kennedy

The tax on capital gains directly affects investment decisions, the mobility and flow of risk capital... the ease or difficulty experienced by new ventures in obtaining capital, and thereby the strength and potential for growth in the economy.

We must seek, above all, a world of peace; a world in which peoples dwell together in mutual respect and work together in mutual regard.

Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It's the system that functions in the pinches that survive

There is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.

A life of complete leisure is the hardest work of all.

A committee is twelve men doing the work of one.

Anyone who is honestly seeking a job and can't find it deserves the attention of the United States government and the people.

It is our task in our time and in our generation, to hand down undiminished to those who come after us, as was handed down to us by those who went before, the natural wealth and beauty which is ours.

Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privileged few reap the benefits of rising abundance.

The function and responsibility of the President is to set before the American people the unfinished business, the things we must do if we are going to succeed as a nation.

The United States has to move very fast to even stand still.

Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.

Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam is the place.

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.

Be strong and of good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed.

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

Remember that our nation's first great leaders were also our first great scholars.

It might be said now that I have the best of both worlds. A Harvard education and a Yale degree.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining. [State of the Union Address January 11 1962]

We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable. [ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)]

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however undramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on. [Address before the United Nations, September 20 1963]