Robert Kennedy Quotes

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Robert Kennedy

Profession : Politician

Birth : November 20, 1925

The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.

Robert Kennedy

But suppose God is black? What if we go to Heaven and we, all our lives, have treated the Negro as an inferior, and God is there, and we look up and He is not white? What then is our response?

Robert Kennedy

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.

Robert Kennedy

The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution - nor by the courts - nor by the officers of the law - nor by the lawyers - but by the men and women who constitute our society - who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.

Robert Kennedy

Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.

Robert Kennedy

Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.

Robert Kennedy

No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.

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

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

In my judgment, physical fitness is basic to all forms of excellence and to a strong, confident nation.

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

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

Robert Kennedy

There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.

Robert Kennedy

The travail of freedom and justice is not easy, but nothing serious and important in life is easy. The history of humanity has been a continuing struggle against temptation and tyranny - and very little worthwhile has ever been achieved without pain.

Robert Kennedy

Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.

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

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

Robert Kennedy

Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.

Robert Kennedy

Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.

Robert Kennedy

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

Robert Kennedy