John F. Kennedy Quotes

The mission of our country is not to make other people like us but to enable them to be free to be themselves.

I think of America not so much as a single country but as a constellation of groups out there competing for air time, energetically expressing themselves and luxuriating in their right to govern themselves. Freedom is that great vaunted word that's always applied to our country - and rightly so.

Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism.

Countries are different. They make different choices. We cannot harmonise everything.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Today the Turkish nation is called on to defend its capacity for civilization, its right to life and independence – its entire future.

If we try and make out of the American people a people of one mind and one mold, we're through.

Our institutions were not devised to bring about uniformity of opinion; if they had we might well abandon hope. It is important to remember, as has well been said, 'the essential characteristic of true liberty is that under its shelter many different types of life and character and opinion and belief can develop unmolested and unobstructed.’

May we know unity without conformity.

What we need is equality without conformity.

The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion.

We can all live under the Constitution and all express ourself in radically different ways and not control each other.

What a tiresome place America would be if freedom meant we all had to think alike or be the same color or wear the same gray flannel suit! That road leads to the conformity of the graveyard!

Externally China desires independence, internally she seeks to maintain her existence as a nation; China therefore strives to loose the bonds that bind her people, and to complete the establishment of a new State.

The truth is that just as the 'West' is not a homogenous entity with one view on foreign and domestic policy, nor are Muslims.

I live in Europe and care about democracy and sovereignty of nation states there.

Equality, rightly understood as our founding fathers understood it, leads to liberty and to the emancipation of creative differences; wrongly understood, as it has been so tragically in our time, it leads first to conformity and then to despotism.

I see Turkey's future as being in Europe, as one of many prosperous, tolerant, democratic countries.

I am convinced that the majority of American people do understand that we have a moral responsibility to foster the concepts of opportunity, free enterprise, the rule of law, and democracy. They understand that these values are the hope of the world.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

Individuality or Unity? I say there's room for both.

A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity.

This is a free country, and to each their own.

It takes all kinds to make the world go 'round. If everyone was straight-laced and uptight, it would sure be a drag. We need a little tug of war in society.

The ideal of all Kosovo is membership in the E.U. and a permanent friendship with the United States. I believe and I am convinced our dreams will come true.