There are no favorites in my office. I treat them all with the same general inconsideration.

It is the excitement of becoming - always becoming, trying, probing, falling, resting, and trying again- but always trying and always gaining

You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.

A perpetual conflict with natural desires seems to be the lot of our present state. In youth we require something of the tardiness and frigidity of age; and in age we must labour to recall the fire and impetuosity of youth; in youth we must learn to respect, and in age to enjoy.

The CIA is made up of boys whose families sent them to Princeton but wouldn't let them into the family brokerage business.

I don't have any handicap. I am all handicap.

But, most of all, the Great Society is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.