John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.

        — in 1960
Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.
When we got into office, the thing that surprised me the most was that things were as bad as we'd been saying they were.
Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.
As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.
For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie?deliberate, contrived, and dishonest?but the myth?persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
Mythology distracts us everywhere—in government as in business, in politics as in economics, in foreign affairs as in domestic affairs. But today I want to particularly consider the myth and reality in our national economy. In recent months many have come to feel, as I do, that the dialog between the parties—between business and government, between the government and the public—is clogged by illusion and platitude and fails to reflect the true realities of contemporary American society.

        — commencement address at Yale University, June 11, 1962