It Was 46 Years Ago Today

May 29, 1917 - November 22, 1963

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 46 years ago today. He was 46 years old. The die was cast for a tumultuous decade of more assassinations, pain, consciousness raising, protest, counterculture high theater, violence, music, peace efforts and war. The innocence that characterized a significant part of the American psyche in the years before Kennedy's murder never ever really was regained, at least for long.

A collection of JFK quotes:

"Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource."

"Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures."

"The basic problems facing the world today are not susceptible to a military solution."

"Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly."

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

"I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty."

"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."

Democrats Vs. Republicans: "We have all made mistakes. But Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted on different scales. Better the occasional faults of a party living in the spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a party frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

"Economic growth without social progress lets the great majority of the people remain in poverty, while a privleged few reap the benefits of rising abundance."

"The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men."

From his speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association addressing his Catholicism:

"I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute--where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote--where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference--and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

"I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish--where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source--where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials--and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all."