Who said: "Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."

"Too often we enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought." – John F Kennedy.

When JFK, the youngest man and first Roman Catholic to be elected President of the USA, was killed on November 22 1963, barely past his first thousand days in office, he also became the youngest President to die - aged 46.

Born in 1917 of Irish parentage, he graduated from Harvard in 1940 and entered the Navy. He gained war hero status in 1943 when his boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer and Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety.

After the war he became a Democratic Congressman from the Boston area; and, in 1953, a Senator, the same year that he married Jacqueline Bouvier. While recuperating from a back operation in 1955, he wrote Profiles in Courage, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history.

Just failing to gain the Democratic nomination in 1956, he received the nomination in 1960 and went on to win the Presidency by a narrow margin against Richard Nixon.

During his presidency, Kennedy expressed modern, liberal and sometimes idealistic views. His short term in office included the failed invasion of Cuba and the resulting missile crisis, the founding of the Peace Corps program to aide developing nations and spread American ideals, improvements in civil rights and a commitment to space exploration.


More quotes from JFK:

Our problems are man-made, therefore they may be solved by man. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.

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 futures, and we are all mortal.

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.

If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

Liberty without learning is always in peril; learning without liberty is always in vain.

So, let us not be blind to our differences - but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved.

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

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 revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

We need men who can dream of things that never were.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity

More Quotes

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