Top 77 Robert Kennedy Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Robert Kennedy Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

I am deeply impressed with the gravity and wisdom with

I am deeply impressed with the gravity and wisdom with which most federal judges approach the responsibility of sentencing. It is a difficult, soul-searching task at best.
Robert Kennedy
I come from a family that has always emphasized and enjoyed sports – golf, tennis, football, baseball and the rest.
Robert Kennedy
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.
Robert Kennedy
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.
Robert Kennedy
It is one thing to open job opportunities. It is another to train people to fill them, or to persuade American enterprise to seek Negro as well as white applicants.
Robert Kennedy
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
Robert Kennedy
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 Kennedy
In my judgment, physical fitness is basic to all forms of excellence and to a strong, confident nation.
Robert Kennedy
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
Robert Kennedy
The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads… It includes… the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children.
Robert Kennedy
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
Robert Kennedy
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Robert Kennedy
Yesterday, we fought wars which destroyed cities. Today, we are concerned with avoiding a war which will destroy the earth. We can adapt atomic energy to produce electricity and move ships, but can we control its use in anger?
Robert Kennedy
One of the great creative statesmen of our age was Franklin Roosevelt. He was creative precisely because he preferred experiment to ideology.
Robert Kennedy
What is learned on the athletic field is not forgotten, nor are the lessons of character that are forged there ever lost. Consider the contributions in the field of public life, business, law, medicine, and the military of those who actively participated in athletics.
Robert Kennedy
In truth, the world is now a seamless web from which no nation, large or small, young or old, can disassociate itself. Every attitude and every action of every nation can affect the welfare and security of every other nation around the globe.
Robert Kennedy
In government, our chief executives have been lawyers. The great majority of our cabinets and congresses are and have been men trained in the law. They have provided the leadership and the statecraft and the store of strength when it was needed.
Robert Kennedy
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?
Robert Kennedy
No one needs to tell me about the importance of the free press in a democratic society or about the essential role a newspaper can play in its community.
Robert Kennedy
We develop the kind of citizens we deserve. If a large number of our children grow up into frustration and poverty, we must expect to pay the price.
Robert Kennedy
Satellite communications connect television screens in Japan with television cameras in England, and the distance of half a world loses its meaning.
Robert Kennedy
When historians consider the significance of the Berlin crises of the mid-20th century, I do not believe that they will record it as an incident in the encirclement of freedom. The true view, in my judgment, will be to see it rather as a major episode in the recession of communism.
Robert Kennedy
In the final analysis, poverty is a condition of helplessness – of inability to cope with the conditions of existence in our complex society.
Robert Kennedy
I can understand the Chinese Wall: it was built as a defense against marauders. But a wall such as that in Berlin, built to prevent people from seeking freedom, is almost beyond comprehension.
Robert Kennedy
The right to vote is the easiest of all rights to grant.
Robert Kennedy
Everything that makes man’s life worthwhile – family, work, education, a place to rear one’s children and a place to rest one’s head – all this depends on the decisions of government; all can be swept away by a government which does not heed the demands of its people, and I mean all of its people.
Robert Kennedy
The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen’s right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 make it the responsibility of the Department of Justice to protect that right.
Robert Kennedy
I don’t believe newspaper reporters can substitute for a district attorney, but a newspaper has a very valid investigative role. Newspaper reports on corruption in government, racketeering and organized crime conditions can be very helpful to your communities and the whole country.
Robert Kennedy
If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist – it’s going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.
Robert Kennedy
When our forbears – yours and mine – came to America, they came because this country promised them something. It promised them an opportunity, nourished by education, not merely to grind for a bare living, but to strive for a good life.
Robert Kennedy
The ultimate relationship between justice and law will be an eternal subject for speculation and analysis. But it may be said that in a democratic society, law is the form which free men give to justice.
Robert Kennedy
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I f

People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
Robert Kennedy
Martin Luther King dedicated his life to love and to justice between fellow human beings. He died in the cause of that effort.
Robert Kennedy
One can find a squalid America as easily as a scenic America; a bitter, hopeless America as easily as the confident America of polyethylene wrapping, new cars, and camping trips in the summer.
Robert Kennedy
I have told friends and supporters who are urging me to run that I would not oppose President Johnson under any foreseeable circumstances.
Robert Kennedy
Freedom possesses many meanings. It speaks not merely in terms of political and religious liberty but also in terms of economic and social progress.
Robert Kennedy
I believe indeterminate sentencing can be extremely useful, but I also believe that any such system should always take into consideration the special knowledge as to the facts in a case which only the trial judge possesses.
Robert Kennedy
We must continue to prove to the world that we can provide a rising standard of living for all men without loss of civil rights or human dignity to any man.
Robert Kennedy
Lawyers have their duties as citizens, but they also have special duties as lawyers. Their obligations go far deeper than earning a living as specialists in corporation or tax law. They have a continuing responsibility to uphold the fundamental principles of justice from which the law cannot depart.
Robert Kennedy
The glory of justice and the majesty of law are created not just by the Constitution – nor by the courts – nor by the officers of the law – nor by the lawyers – but by the men and women who constitute our society – who are the protectors of the law as they are themselves protected by the law.
Robert Kennedy
Nothing is more false than the notion that the triumph of Communism is inevitable or that the Communists are steadily pushing the free world into a corner.
Robert Kennedy
One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert Kennedy
From the first moment of independence, the United States has been dedicated to innovation as a way of government and a way of life.
Robert Kennedy
Ultimately, America’s answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.
Robert Kennedy
The travail of freedom and justice is not easy, but nothing serious and important in life is easy. The history of humanity has been a continuing struggle against temptation and tyranny – and very little worthwhile has ever been achieved without pain.
Robert Kennedy
The free way of life proposes ends, but it does not prescribe means.
Robert Kennedy
Automation provides us with wondrous increases of production and information, but does it tell us what to do with the men the machines displace? Modern industry gives us the capacity for unparalleled wealth – but where is our capacity to make that wealth meaningful to the poor of every nation?
Robert Kennedy
When companies get together secretly to fix prices and attempt to eliminate competition, honest businessmen suffer. I think this is wrong.
Robert Kennedy
There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed.
Robert Kennedy
To the extent that laws are founded on morality and on logic, they can lead men’s hearts and minds.
Robert Kennedy
The leaders of the world face no greater task than that of avoiding nuclear war. While preserving the cause of freedom, we must seek abolition of war through programs of general and complete disarmament. The Test-Ban Treaty of 1963 represents a significant beginning in this immense undertaking.
Robert Kennedy
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.
Robert Kennedy