Explore Quotes by Robert Kennedy

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

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

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

It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.

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.

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.

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.

All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.

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

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.

I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.

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?

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.

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.

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

There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?

Don't get mad, get even.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others.

Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection.

Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change.

The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.