Great Throughts Treasury

"If only we are faithful to our past, we shall not have to fear our future. The cause of peace, justice and liberty need not fail and must not fail."

"Mankind will never win lasting peace so long as men use their full resources only in tasks of war. While we are yet at peace, let us mobilize the potentialities, particularly the moral and spiritual potentialities, which we usually reserve for war."

"The world will never have lasting peace so long as men reserve for war the finest human qualities. Peace, no less than war, requires idealism and self-sacrifice and a righteous and dynamic faith."

"A peaceful world is a world in which differences are tolerated, and are not eliminated by violence."

"A man’s accomplishments in life are the cumulative effect of his attention to detail."

"You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action."

"A capacity to change is indispensable. Equally indispensable is the capacity to hold fast to that which is good."

"The ability to get to the verge without getting into war is the necessary art. If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."

"Of all tasks of government the most basic is to protect its citizens against violence."

"The United Nations was not set up to be a reformatory. It was assumed that you would be good before you got in and not that being in would make you good."

"There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction. "

"The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it is the same problem you had last year"

"I hope the day will never come when the American nation will be the champion of the status quo. Once that happens, we shall have forfeited, and rightly forfeited, the support of the unsatisfied, of those who are the victims of inevitable imperfections, of those who, young in years or spirit, believe that they can make a better world and of those who dream dreams and want to make their dreams to come true."

"Economic and military power can be developed under the spur of laws and appropriations. But moral power does not derive from any act of Congress. It depends on the relations of a people to their God. It is the churches to which we must look to develop the resources for the great moral offensive that is required to make human rights secure, and to win a just and lasting peace."

"Freedom and duty always go hand in hand, and if the free do not accept the duty of social responsibility, they will not long remain free."

"I wouldn't attach too much importance to these student riots. I remember when I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, I used to go out and riot occasionally."

"Local defense will always be important. But there is no local defense which alone will contain the mighty land power of the Communist world. Local defense must be reinforced by the further deterrent of massive retaliatory power."

"If you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost."

"Our capacity to retaliate must be, and is, massive in order to deter all forms of aggression."

"Once -- many, many years ago -- I thought I made a wrong decision. Of course, it turned out that I had been right all along. But I was wrong to have thought that I was wrong."

"Peace will never be won if men reserve for war their greatest efforts, Peace, too, requires well-directed and sustained sacrificial endeavor. Given that, we can, I believe, achieve the great goal of our foreign policy, that of enabling our people to enjoy in peace the blessings of liberty."

"The principle of neutrality ... has increasingly become an obsolete conception, and, except under very special circumstances, it is an immoral and shortsighted conception."

"We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face."

"Peace can be a cover whereby evil men can perpetrate diabolical wrongs."