... the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy.

The Greeks understood that mind and body must develop in harmounious proportions to produce a creative intelligence.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end; where all men and all churches are treated as equal; where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice; where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind; and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Those [presidents] who were strongest intellectually were also strongest spiritually.

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.