Where Are They?

John F. Kennedy appeared as the quote of the day in my Gmail, so I followed the link and read a few of his quotations.

I was absolutely blown away.

Of course, I’d heard most of these in school and in video clips growing up. The thing that scares me the most is how far we’ve deviated from what America used to stand for. If you don’t believe me, here are a few to think about:

Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.

I am not the Catholic candidate for President. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for President, who happens also to be a Catholic.

I look forward to a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose.

If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past. Let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

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.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

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.

The very word ’secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.