Top 60 Jackie Kennedy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There will be great presidents again but there will never be another Camelot.”

— Jackie Kennedy

2. “Pearls are always appropriate.”

— Jackie Kennedy

3. “There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.”

— Jackie Kennedy

4. “If you want things to be right, you have to do them yourself.”

— Jackie Kennedy

5. “We should all do something to right the wrongs that we see and not just complain about them.”

— Jackie Kennedy

6. “I want minimum information given with maximum politeness.”

— Jackie Kennedy

7. “Once you can express yourself, you can tell the world what you want from it. All the changes in the world, for good or evil, were first brought about by words.”

— Jackie Kennedy

8. “Love of books is the best of all.”

— Jackie Kennedy

9. “I think my biggest achievement is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I’m proud of that.”

— Jackie Kennedy

10. “I want to live my life, not record it.”

— Jackie Kennedy

11. “I am happiest when I am alone.”

— Jackie Kennedy

12. “If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life.”

— Jackie Kennedy

13. “You have to be doing something you enjoy. That is a definition of happiness!”

— Jackie Kennedy

14. “Being a reporter seems a ticket out to the world.”

— Jackie Kennedy

15. “If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

— Jackie Kennedy

16. “The first time you marry for love, the second for money, and the third for companionship.”

— Jackie Kennedy

17. “The only routine with me is no routine at all.”

— Jackie Kennedy

18. “I am a woman above everything else.”

— Jackie Kennedy

19. “Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the President’s widow?”

— Jackie Kennedy

20. “You have only one chance to raise your child.”

— Jackie Kennedy

21. “One should always dress like a marble column.”

— Jackie Kennedy

22. “A great goal in life is the only fortune worth finding.”

— Jackie Kennedy

23. “Whenever I was upset by something in the papers, Jack always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.”

— Jackie Kennedy

24. “The river of sludge will go on and on. It isn’t about me.”

— Jackie Kennedy

25. “You must continue. Poets are the ones who change the world.”

— Jackie Kennedy

26. “Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldn’t God understand that I just want to be with him?”

— Jackie Kennedy

27. “Even though people may be well known, they hold in their hearts the emotions of a simple person for the moments that are the most important of those we know on earth: birth, marriage and death.”

— Jackie Kennedy

28. “I will tell you one thing. They will never drag me out like a little old widow like they did Mrs. Wilson when President Wilson died. I will never be used that way.”

— Jackie Kennedy

29. “Being away from home gave me the chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide, and I came home glad to start in here again with a love for Europe that I am afraid will never leave me.”

— Jackie Kennedy

30. “History – its what those bitter old men write.”

— Jackie Kennedy

31. “Now, I think that I should have known that he was magic all along. I did know it – but I should have guessed that it would be too much to ask to grow old with and see our children grow up together. So now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.”

— Jackie Kennedy

32. “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.”

— Jackie Kennedy

33. “The greatest responsibility is your children. If my children turned out badly, I’d feel that nothing I had done was worthwhile.”

— Jackie Kennedy

34. “If you cut people off from what nourishes them spiritually, something in them dies.”

— Jackie Kennedy

35. “One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.”

— Jackie Kennedy

36. “I’ll be a wife and mother first, then First Lady.”

— Jackie Kennedy

37. “I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.”

— Jackie Kennedy

38. “I don’t think there are any men who are faithful to their wives.”

— Jackie Kennedy

39. “The children have been a wonderful gift to me, and I’m thankful to have once again seen our world through their eyes. They restore my faith in the family’s future.”

— Jackie Kennedy

40. “I think the best thing I can do is to be a distraction. A husband lives and breathes his work all day long. If he comes home to more table thumping, how can the poor man ever relax?”

— Jackie Kennedy

41. “Dear God, please take care of your servant John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

— Jackie Kennedy

42. “If school days are the happiest days of your life, I’m hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight.”

— Jackie Kennedy

43. “You have to be doing something you enjoy. That is a definition of happiness: Complete use of one’s faculties along lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope. It applies to women as well as to men. We can’t all reach it, but we can try to reach it to some degree.”

— Jackie Kennedy

44. “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.”

— Jackie Kennedy

45. “We are the only country in the world that trashes its old buildings. Too late we realize how very much we need them.”

— Jackie Kennedy

46. “You have to have been a Republican to know how good it is to be a Democrat.”

— Jackie Kennedy

47. “A camel makes an elephant feel like a jet plane.”

— Jackie Kennedy

48. “Being a journalist seemed the ideal way of both having a job and experiencing the world, especially for anyone with a sense of adventure.”

— Jackie Kennedy

49. “When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we’ve made it.”

— Jackie Kennedy

50. “What is sad for women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. What were they going to do when the children are grown – watch the raindrops coming down the window pane?”

— Jackie Kennedy