I was 22 when JFK was murdered, and I will never recover from it… Never.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

It is true that the king has made a truce with the duke of Burgundy for fifteen days and that the duke is to turn over the city of Paris at the end of fifteen days. Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

I’m on record that it didn’t really traumatize me to do away with some people.

The time is near at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Alexander Hamilton started the U.S. Treasury with nothing, and that was the closest our country has ever been to being even.

At one time in my life, from the time I was seven until I was about 13, I didn’t speak. I only spoke to my brother. The reason I didn’t speak: I had been molested, and I told the name of the molester to my brother who told it to the family.

After the 9/11 apocalypse happened in New York City, people, particularly New Yorkers, who breathed in the ash, or saw the results of that, have a tendency to keep seeing echoes and having flashbacks to it.

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.

I think 9/11 affected everybody in one way or another.

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

We Americans… bear the ark of liberties of the world.

We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

I break orbital bones.

Unions did in fact build the middle class. And here’s what that did. That built the United States of America as we know it.

I cannot swallow whole the view of Lincoln as the Great Emancipator.

For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned – take our post-traumatic growth – and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear.

I think if we go back and check our record, the Negro has proven beyond a doubt that we have been more than patient in seeking our rights as American citizens.

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

What happened in the missile crisis in October 1962 has been prettified to make it look as if acts of courage and thoughtfulness abounded. The truth is that the whole episode was almost insane.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

We also can’t try to take over and rebuild every country that falls into crisis. That’s not leadership; that’s a recipe for quagmire, spilling American blood and treasure that ultimately weakens us. It’s the lesson of Vietnam, of Iraq – and we should have learned it by now.

The events of October 1962 are widely hailed as Kennedy’s finest hour.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.

You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

For the record, our democracy is revered around the world. And free elections are the best way on Earth to choose our leaders. This is how we elected John F. Kennedy; Ronald Reagan; two George Bushes; Bill Clinton; and Barack Obama. It has worked for decades.

The battle of Austerlitz is the grandest of all I have fought.

We Americans think, in every country in transition, there’s a Thomas Jefferson hiding behind some rock or a James Madison beyond one sand dune.

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

In 1962, war was avoided by Khrushchev’s willingness to accept Kennedy’s hegemonic demands.

I’d read up on the history of our country and I’d become fascinated with the story of the Alamo. To me it represented the fight for freedom, not just in America, but in all countries.

I was drafted during the Korean War.

There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.