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Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

Robert Kennedy

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Robert Kennedy
Age: 42 †
Born: 1925
Born: November 20
Died: 1968
Died: June 6
Lawyer
Military Officer
Politician
Writer
Brookline
Massachusetts
Bobby Kennedy
RFK
Robert Francis Bobby Kennedy
Robert Kennedy
Robert Francis Kennedy
Ultimately
Mistakes
Criticism
Wove
Mistake
Strangled
Making
Prohibited
Every
Corrected
People
Repression
Dictatorship

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All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind.
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But history will judge you, and as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, in the extent to which you have used your gifts and talents to lighten and enrich the lives of your fellow men. In your hands lies the future of your world and the fulfillment of the best qualities of your own spirit.
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Whenever men take the law into their own hands, the loser is the law. And when the law loses, freedom languishes.
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Some men see what is, and ask 'Why?' I see what might be, and ask 'Why Not?'
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Few men are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change the world which yields most painfully to change.
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Now I can go back to being ruthless again.
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The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present
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Our future may lie beyond our vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle.
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The intolerant man will not rely on persuasion, or on the worth of the idea. He would deny to others the very freedom of opinion or of dissent which he so stridently demands for himself. He cannot trust democracy.
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Each nation has different obstacles and different goals, shaped by the vagaries of history and of experience. Yet as I talk to young people around the world I am impressed not by the diversity but by the closeness of their goals, their desires and their concerns and their hope for the future.
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I now know how Tojo felt when he was planning Pearl Harbor.
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Just because we cannot see clearly the end of the road, that is no reason for not setting out on the essential journey. On the contrary, great change dominates the world, and unless we move with change we will become its victims.
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After all, a bank without assets is hardly a bank at all.
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I love this city. If I am elected, I'll move the White House to San Francisco. Everybody's so friendly.
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Every society gets the kind of criminal it deserves. What is equally true is that every community gets the kind of law enforcement it insists on.
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We can master change not though force or fear, but only though the free work of an understanding mind, though an openness to new knowledge and fresh outlooks, which can only strengthen the most fragile and most powerful of human gifts: the gift of reason.
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When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies...
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Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.
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