Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. – RFK
“There are children in the Mississippi Delta whose bellies are swollen with hunger … Many of them cannot go to school because they have no clothes or shoes. These conditions are not confined to rural Mississippi. They exist in dark tenements in Washington, D.C., within sight of the Capitol, in Harlem, in South Side Chicago, in Watts. There are children in each of these areas who have never been to school, never seen a doctor or a dentist. There are children who have never heard conversation in their homes, never read or even seen a book.” – RFK
Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills — against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence. Yet many of the world’s great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man. A young monk began the Protestant reformation, a young general extended an empire from Macedonia to the borders of the earth, and a young woman reclaimed the territory of France. It was a young Italian explorer who discovered the New World, and 32 year old Thomas Jefferson who proclaimed that all men are created equal. Give me a place to stand, said Archimedes, and I will move the world. These men moved the world, and so can we all. - Robert Kennedy
“If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all the youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better world for tomorrow.” RFK
So I come here today, to this great university, to ask for your help: not for me, but for your country and for the people of Vietnam. You are the people, as President Kennedy said, who have “the least ties to the present and the greatest ties to the future.” I urge you to learn the harsh facts that lurk behind the mask of official illusion with which we have concealed our true circumstances, even from ourselves. Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies — and what they can do to the nation thatThomas Jefferson once told us was the last, best, hope of man. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America, but for the heart of America. In these next eight months, we are going to decide what this country will stand for — and what kind of men we are. So I ask for your help, in the cities and homes of this state, into the towns and farms: contributing your concern and action, warning of the danger of what we are doing — and the promise of what we can do. I ask you, as tens of thousands of young men and women are doing all over this land, to organize yourselves, and then to go forth and work for new policies — work to change our direction — and thus restore our place at the point of moral leadership, in our country, in our own hearts, and all around the world….Robert F. Kennedy, March 18, 1968, Landon Lecture at Kansas State University
http://bobby-kennedy.com/
There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why…I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?
Robert Kennedy
