The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender, or submission.

• Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life.
• The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.
• A nation which has forgotten the quality of courage which in the past has been brought to public life is not as likely to insist upon or regard that quality in its chosen leaders today - and in fact we have forgotten.
• For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.
• If anyone is crazy enough to want to kill a president of the United States, he can do it. All he must be prepared to do is give his life for the president's.
• The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.
• I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.
• There is always inequality in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded and some men never leave the country. Life is unfair.
• Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.
• The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were.