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.
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.
We know that if one man's rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.
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.
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.
Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic
We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.
You knew that what is given or granted can be taken away, that what is begged can be refused; but that what is earned is kept.
Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.