There are a number of things wrong with Washington. One of them is that everyone is too far from home.

The United States pledges before you-and therefore before the world-its determination to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma-to devote its entire heart and mind to find the way by which the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.

I'll tell you what leadership is. It's persuasion and conciliation, and education, and patience.

...the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness must be preserved.

Every leader should have enough humility to accept, publicly, the responsibility for the mistakes of the subordinates he has himself selected and, likewise, to give them credit, publicly, for their triumphs.

With a full century of contrary proof in our possession and despite our demonstrated capacity for cooperative teamwork, some among us seem to accept the shibboleth of an unbridgeable gap between those who hire and those who are employed. We miserably fail to challenge the lie that what is good for management is necessarily bad for labor; that for one side to profit, the other must be depressed. Such distorted doctrine is false and foreign to the American scene where common ideals and purpose permit us a common approach toward the common good.

We look upon this shaken earth, and we declare our firm and fixed purpose - the building of a peace with justice in a world where moral law prevails.