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 Kennedy
People say I am ruthless. I am not ruthless. And if I find the man who is calling me ruthless, I shall destroy him.
Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.
One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.
The Gross National Product measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile, and it can tell us everything about America - except whether we are proud to be Americans.
I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down you have to struggle to survive.
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?
All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity.
Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
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.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Progress is a nice word. But change is its motivator. And change has its enemies.
I believe that, as long as there is plenty, poverty is evil.
What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists, is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents.
Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
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.
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.
