It is all too easy for a society to measure itself against some abstract philosophical principle or political slogan. But in the end, there must remain the question: What kind of life is one society providing to the people that live in it?

I have seen in the Halls of Congress more idealism, more humanness, more compassion, more profiles of courage than in any other institution that I have ever known.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.

My friends, to those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil-rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: The time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights.

Our opposition will never understand the Democratic Party. Our Party is--to the unpracticed eyes of the old Republican Tories--a mysterious contraption that usually seems to be moving in a thousand directions. What they don't know is what hurts them. For all that movement in the Democratic Party is caused by the internal combustion of creative ferment, of ideas, of people vigorously committed to the proposition that change and social progress are not only to be desired; they are necessities of twentieth-century America.

To be realistic today is to be visionary. To be realistic is to be starry-eyed.