“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

[Commencement Address at American University, June 10 1963]”
― John F. Kennedy

“Art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color”
― John F. Kennedy

“The sum of a million facts is not the truth.”
― William Manchester

“If we go as far as we can into the darkness, regardless of the consequences, I believe a midnight truth will free us from our bondage to violence and bring us to the light of peace.”
― James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died & Why It Matters

“I'm afraid, based on my own experience, that fascism will come to America in the name of national security.”
― Jim Garrison

“Even without all the independent evidence proving that Oswald killed Kennedy, it was obvious that Oswald’s murder of Tippit alone proved it was he who murdered Kennedy.”
― Vincent Bugliosi, Reclaiming History – The Assassination of John F Kennedy

“Equality in America has never meant literal equality of condition or capacity. There will always be inequalities in character and ability in any society. Equality has meant rather that in the words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." It is meant that in a democratic society there should be no inequalities in opportunities or in freedoms.”
― John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants

“It's almost as if Kennedy grabbed a decade out of the 21st century," Cernan said, "and spliced it into the 1960s." That helps to explain why, as I wrote in 1993 in the preface of this book, we weren't entirely ready for Apollo, and why we have struggled to absorb its impact ever since it happened. How could the most futuristic thing humans have ever done be so far in the past?”
― Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon

“...it...planted seeds of doubt as to whether we think diabolically enough when we wonder what our government is doing behind our backs.”
― Alexandra Zapruder, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film

“Six point nine seconds of heat and light. Let's call a meeting to analyze the blur. Let's devote our lives to understanding this moment, separating the elements of each crowded second. We will build theories that gleam like jade idols, intriguing systems of assumption, four-faced, graceful. We will follow the bullet trajectories backwards to the lives that occupy the shadows, actual men who moan in their dreams.”
― Don DeLillo, Libra

“She was a little removed,” Jack said as an adult. In private, he complained that Rose never told him that she loved him. Jack’s friend Charles Spalding, who saw the family up close, described Rose as “so cold, so distant from the whole thing . . . I doubt if she ever rumpled the kid’s hair in his whole life. . . . It just didn’t exist: the business of letting your son know you’re close, that she’s there. She wasn’t.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy told the journalist Theodore White that “history made him [Jack] what he was . . . this lonely sick boy. His mother really didn’t love him. . . . She likes to go around talking about being the daughter of the Mayor of Boston, or how she was an ambassador’s wife. . . . She didn’t love him. . . . History made him what he was.”
― Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1961.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“The assassination of President Kennedy killed not only a man but a complex of illusions. It demolished the myth that hate and violence can be confined in an airtight chamber to be employed against but a few. Suddenly the truth was revealed that hate is a contagion; that it grows and spreads as a disease; that no society is so healthy that it can automatically maintain its immunity. If a smallpox epidemic had been raging in the South, President Kennedy would have been urged to avoid the area. There was a plague afflicting the South, but its perils were not perceived.

Negroes tragically know political assassination well. In the life of Negro civil-rights leaders, the whine of the bullet from ambush, the roar of the bomb have all too often broken the night's silence. They have replaced lynching as a political weapon. More than a decade ago, sudden death came to Mr. and Mrs. Harry T. Moore, N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Florida. The Reverend George Lee of Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot to death on the steps of a rural courthouse. The bombings multiplied. Nineteen sixty-three was a year of assassinations. Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi; William Moore in Alabama; six Negro children in Birmingham—and who could doubt that these too were political assassinations?

The unforgivable default of our society has been its failure to apprehend the assassins. It is a harsh judgment, but undeniably true, that the cause of the indifference was the identity of the victims. Nearly all were Negroes. And so the plague spread until it claimed the most eminent American, a warmly loved and respected president. The words of Jesus "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" were more than a figurative expression; they were a literal prophecy.

We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man’s life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded the country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Want to know something funny? Even people capable of living in the past don't really know what the future holds.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63

“O God, Thy Sea Is So Great And My Boat Is So Small”
― John F. Kennedy, P.T. 109

“I always tell people JFK's book 'Profiles in Courage' was a very slim volume.”
― Larry J. Sabato

“Speculative fiction writers, those who speak truth to power through their literature, must lie while telling the truth. Witnesses in the assassination of John F. Kennedy - for example - can back me up on this fact, if only they could.”
― A.K. Kuykendall

“Lee Harvey Oswald fired the starting gun of America's nightmare years. This insignificant man's bullets didn't just echo through Dealey Plaza in 1963. The shockwaves from them arguably fuelled the turbulent events of the rest of the 1960s and only dissipated with Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Art and poetry are humbling in their power to make us bigger people. (From JFK: The Last Speech book)”
― Biddy Martin, Amherst College: An Architectural Tour

“By the time John F. Kennedy became involved in 1961, the situation was out of control. So Kennedy simply invaded the country. In 1962, he sent the U.S. Air Force to start bombing South Vietnam, using planes with South Vietnamese markings. Kennedy authorized the use of napalm, chemical warfare, to destroy the ground cover and crops. He started the process of driving the rural population into what were called 'strategic hamlets,' essentially concentration camps, where people were surrounded by barbed wire, supposedly to protect them from the guerillas who the U.S. government knew perfectly well they supported. This 'pacification' ultimately drove millions of people out of the countryside while destroying large parts of it. Kennedy also began operations against North Vietnam on a small scale. That was 1962.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“In 1963, the Kennedy administration got wind of the fact that the government of Ngo Dinh Diem it had installed in South Vietnam was trying to arrange peace negotiations with the North. Diem and his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were trying to negotiate a peace settlement. So the Kennedy liberals determined that they had to be thrown out. The Kennedy administration organized a coup in which the two brothers were killed and they put in their own guy, meanwhile escalating the war. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy. Contrary to a lot of mythology, Kennedy was one of the hawks in the administration to the very last minute. He did agree to proposals for withdrawal from Vietnam, because he knew the war was very unpopular there, but always with the condition of withdrawal after victory.”
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

“Even the conspirators’ mistakes fed into the desired result. The term ‘rifle among Oswald’s possessions’ passed into the evidence and Report despite the fact that it was an order, not an evidentiary observation.”
― Steve Aylett, Lint

“She later said, “Sex to Jack [Kennedy] meant no more than a cup of coffee.” How did she know? Did she ever have coffee with him? I have no reason to think so, but in that picture, the president looks like he’s about to start the percolator.”
― John Dickerson, On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star

“What are two things Malcolm X, John F Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King have in common? They all were assassinated and they rebelled against the real owners of this country.”
― James Thomas Kesterson Jr

“November 22nd, 1963, was the day of John F. Kennedy's assassination. It was also the last day that America had a Catholic President until the election of Joe Biden in 2020. The gap will officially end with his inauguration in January 2021.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Anyone who thinks they can get in to politics to be of genuine service to mankind is simply kidding themselves. They'll never be permitted to rise within the system, and if they do, as soon as their true intentions become clear, they'll be disposed of.. JFK was proof of that..”
― Mango Wodzak

“Oscar Handlin has said, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history." In the same sense we cannot really speak of a particular immigrant contribution to America, because All Americans have been immigrants or the decedents of immigrants, even the Indians as mentioned before, migrated to the American continent. We can only speak of people whose roots in America are older or newer.”
― John F. Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants

“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage. . . Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
― John F. Kennedy, The Speeches of President John F. Kennedy

“I doubt that there are no Communists in the US State Department, I wonder, I don't understand that the Americans go along with the Russians and then say they voted reluctantly, so to speak.”
― Moïse Tshombe

“Jimmy Allen wasn’t. And yet, he was on that map. One of the four dead men Nan had drawn JFK Jr.’s attention to. Three of those four had been scheduled to appear in front of Congress in regard to the assassination: Johnny Roselli, George de Mohrenschildt (Lee Harvey Oswald’s friend), and Carlos Prio Socarrás, one-time president of Cuba. All of them had died violently before they could testify: Roselli murdered, de Mohrenschildt and Prio by suicide. And then there was Jimmy Allen. What made him so special? What was his connection to the assassination? Why had Nan drawn JFK Jr.’s attention to him?”
― Rusty McClure;Dave Stern