Robert Kennedy
Robert Kennedy
Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy, commonly known by his initials RFK, was an American politician from Massachusetts. He served as a senator for New York from 1965 until his assassination in 1968. He was previously the 64th U.S. Attorney General from 1961 to 1964, serving under his older brother, President John F. Kennedy and his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson. An icon of modern American liberalism and member of the Democratic Party, Kennedy ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth20 November 1925
CountryUnited States of America
In my judgment, the slogan "black power" and what has been associated with it has set the civil rights movement back considerably in the United States over the period of the last several months.
We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.
States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . . The time is long past - if indeed it ever existed - when we should permit the noble concept of States' rights to be betrayed and corrupted into a slogan to hide the bald denial of American rights, of civil rights, and of human rights.
The road toward equality of freedom is not easy, and great cost and danger march alongside us. We are committed to peaceful and nonviolent change, and that is important for all to understand - though all change is unsettling. Still, even in the turbulence of protest and struggle is greater hope for the future, as men learn to claim and achieve for themselves the rights formerly petitioned from others.
Since the days of Greece and Rome the word 'citizen' was a title of honor. We have often seen more emphasis put on the rights of citizenship than on its responsibilities.
If communist unions ever gain a position to exercise influence in the transport lanes of the world, the free world will have suffered a staggering blow.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
In Massachusetts they [Democratic politicians] steal, in California they feud, and in New York they lie.
We should, I believe, beware of the pitfalls described by Taine: 'Imagine a man who sets out on a voyage equipped with a pair of spectacles that magnify things to an extraordinary degree. A hair on his hand, a spot on the tablecloth, the shifting fold of a coat, all will attract his attention; at this rate, he will not go far, he will spend his day taking six steps and will never get out of his room.' We have to get out of this room.
Sometimes people think that because you have money and position you are immune from the human experience. But I can feel as lonesome and lost as the next man when I turn the key in the door and go into an empty house that is usually full of kids and dogs.
It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.
I love this city. If I am elected, I'll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody's so friendly.
Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic
The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.