Top 100 Robert F. Kennedy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

52. “But the greatest danger of all would be to do nothing.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

53. “I love this city. If I am elected, I’ll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody’s so friendly.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

54. “I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

55. “I think there is an obligation on the part of all of us to stay informed and aware.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

56. “He tells so many lies that he convinces himself after a while that he’s telling the truth. He just doesn’t recognize truth or falsehood.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

57. “I dream of things that are not and ask why not.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

58. “We know that if one man’s rights are denied, the rights of all are endangered.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

59. “Someone once said that World War Three would be fought with atomic weapons and the next war with sticks and stones.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

60. “The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer, not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion, or a particular race, but to all its people.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

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

— Robert F. Kennedy

62. “Nations around the world look to us for the leadership not merely by strength of arms but by strength of our convictions.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

63. “If our constitution had followed the style of Saint Paul, the First Amendment might have concluded: “But the greatest of these is speech.” In the darkness of tyranny, this is the key to the sunlight. If it is granted, all doors open. If it is withheld, none.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

64. “Men and women with freed minds may often be mistaken, but they are seldom fooled. They may be influenced, but they cannot be intimidated. They may be perplexed, but they will never be lost.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

65. “Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

66. “We develop the kind of citizens we deserve.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

67. “When Khrushchev asked whether his brass hats would guarantee that keeping the missiles in Cuba would not bring about nuclear war, they looked at him, he later told Norman Cousins of the Saturday Review, an informal emissary between Kennedy and Khrushchev, “as though I were out of my mind or, what was worse, a traitor. So I said to myself, ‘To hell with these maniacs.’”6.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

68. “A hopeless man is a very desperate and dangerous man, almost a dead man.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

69. “I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

70. “While free markets tend to democratize a society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

71. “My views on birth control are somewhat distorted by the fact that I was seventh of nine children.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

72. “The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

73. “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.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

74. “It is the essence of responsibility to put the public good ahead of personal gain.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

75. “Courage is the virtue that President Kennedy most admired. He sought out those people who had demonstrated in some way, whether it was on a battlefield or a baseball diamond, in a speech or fighting for a cause, that they had courage that they would stand up, that they could be counted on.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

76. “Men without hope, resigned to despair and oppression, do not make revolutions. It is when expectation replaces submission, when despair is touched with the awareness of possibility, that the forces of human desire and the passion for justice are unloosed.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

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

— Robert F. Kennedy

78. “Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

79. “If freedom makes social progress possible, so social progress strengthens and enlarges freedom. The two are inseparable partners in the great adventure of humanity.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

80. “In the nuclear age, superpowers make war like porcupines make love – carefully.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

81. “Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

82. “The natural state of a human being is dignity.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

83. “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.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

84. “Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world which yields most painfully to change.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

85. “It is immoral to see evil and not act on it.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

86. “Courage is the most important attribute of a lawyer.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

87. “Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

88. “The only sin is pride.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

89. “Religion is a salve for confusion and misdirection.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

90. “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.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

91. “I thought they’d get one of us, but Jack, after all he’s been through, never worried about it I thought it would be me.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

92. “I love this city. If I’m elected, I will move the White House to San Francisco. I went to Fisherman’s Wharf and they even let me into Allioto’s. It may be Baghdad by the Bay to you, but to me it’s Resurrection City.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

93. “Perhaps to some extent we have lost sight of the fact that LSD can be very, very helpful in our society if used properly.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

94. “It will help erase the idea that politics is a second-rate profession and a dirty business.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

95. “It is an unfinished society that we offer the world-a society that is forever committed to change, to improvement and to growth, that will never stagnate in the certitude of ideology or the finalities of dogma.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

96. “What happens to the country, to the world, depends on what we do with what others have left us.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

97. “Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

98. “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.”

— Robert F. Kennedy

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

— Robert F. Kennedy

100. “Killing one man is murder. Killing millions is a statistic.”

— Robert F. Kennedy