John F. Kennedy Quotes
The great enemy of the truth is often not the lie ... but the myth.
John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, 35th President of the United States (Democrat, MA), Quoted on CNN November 19, 1993
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
See {115604} for a similar sentiment from England.
Bruce is one of the few American Comedians to so offend the political establishment that he was constantly legally harassed throughout his career. He was actually criminally convicted in New York for obscenity. In 2003 he was posthumously pardoned by the New York Governor, the first posthumous pardon in state history.
See {638470} for more on the subject by Mencken.
See Ben Franklin for an earlier similar sentiment {465143}.
One classic example was the fact that in 2012 about one third of Republicans believed that President Obama was a Muslim when he was a devout Christian. The infamous lie had 3 grains of truth: Obama’s father was a Muslim. his middle name was an Islamic name. and he had lived and gone to school as a young boy in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country.
The claims made by some Republicans were so absurd and extreme that the whole Party was tarred. Some even claimed that the legislation required “Death Panels” which would decide on which elderly people would be treated and which should be abandoned to no die with no treatment when there was no such thing even proposed by anyone, much less passed in the legislation.
This sentiment was apparently first expressed by the English Calvinist Minister, Charles Spurgeon, 1834-1892.
After the Constitution had been ratified, there was a concerted attempt on the part of the Southern Slave States to minimize the importance of the Declaration of Independence. They feared that the equality principle in the Declaration should be seen by Americans as desirable policy which clearly meant slavery was untenable. There were three approaches all used by the Southerners. First, they tried to make it clear that the Declaration had no weight in American law or moral principles as it was superseded by the Constitution. Second, they claimed that it could only have applied to white men as Black males were not really men. Third, that the statement was patently false. This quotation illustrates the latter.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, often referred to by his initials JFK, was an American politician who served as the 35th president of the United States from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. Kennedy served at the height of the Cold War, and the majority of his work as president concerned relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba. A Democrat, Kennedy represented Massachusetts in both houses of the U.S. Congress prior to becoming president.
