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

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.

There is an old saying that the course of civilization is a race between catastrophe and education. In a democracy such as ours, we must make sure that education wins the race.

All of us in the Senate live in an iron lung-the iron lung of politics, and it is no easy task to emerge from that rarified atmosphere in order to breathe the same fresh air our constituents breathe.

I see little more important to the future of our country and our civilization than the full recognition of the place of the artist.

We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence — on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day

The day before my inauguration President Eisenhower told me, You'll find that no easy problems ever come to the President of the United States. If they are easy to solve, somebody else has solved them. I found that hard to believe, but now I know it is true.