John F. Kennedy

Regarding the Republican Party: They follow the Hitler line – no matter how big the lie, repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.

I have just received the following wire from my generous daddy: "Dear Jack – Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary – I’ll be damned if I am going to pay for a landslide.

Senators, we hear, must be politicians – and politicians must be concerned only with winning votes, not with statesmanship or courage. Mothers may still want their favorite sons to grow up to be President, but according to a famous Gallup poll of some years ago, they do not want them to become politicians in the process.

We shall need compromises in the days ahead, to be sure. But these will be, or should be, compromises of issues, not of principles. We can compromise our political positions, but not ourselves... Compromise does not mean cowardice. Indeed it is frequently the compromisers and conciliators who are faced with the severest tests of political courage as they oppose the extremist views of their constituents.

Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past — let us accept our own responsibility for the future.

Some of my colleagues who are criticized today for lack of forthright principles – or who are looked upon with scornful eyes as compromising “politicians” – are simply engaged in the fine art of conciliating, balancing and interpreting the forces and factions of public opinion, an art essential to keeping our nation united and enabling our Government to function.

But the question is how we will compromise and with whom. For it is easy to seize upon unnecessary concessions, not as means of legitimately resolving conflicts but as methods of “going along.”

The voters selected us, in short, because they had confidence in our judgement and our ability to exercise that judgement from a position where we could determine what were their own best interest, as a part of the nation's interest.

If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a little better place in which to live.

In the Chinese language, the word "crisis" is composed of two characters, one representing danger and the other, opportunity.