A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors-as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, `the survivors would envy the dead.' For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.

No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.

The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough - more than enough - of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on - not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution.

A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.

No American is ever made better off by pulling a fellow American down, and all of us are made better off whenever any one of us is made better off.

I was never accepted into certain parts of New England society because my grandfather was an Irish barkeep.