To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.

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.

A politician never forgets the precarious nature of elective life. We have never established a practice of tenure in public office.

In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.

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.

We live by hope. We do not ever get all we want when we want it. But we have to believe that someday, somehow, some way, it will be better and that we can make it so.

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