“While the wall is the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system, for all the world to see, we take no satisfaction in it, for it is, as your Mayor has said, an offense not only against history but an offense against humanity, separating families, dividing husbands and wives and brothers and sisters, and dividing a people who wish to be joined together.”
John F. Kennedy
Ich bin ein Berliner speech (Primary source)
On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a brief address from a platform outside Rathaus Schöneberg, the city hall of West Berlin, before a crowd estimated at several hundred thousand. The speech came during a European tour and roughly twenty-two months after East Germany had begun construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.
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“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
— John F. Kennedy Primary source“The idea that Britain loses every battle except the last has proved correct so many times in the past that the average Englishman is unwilling to make great personal sacrifices until the danger is overwhelmingly apparent.”
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— Benjamin Franklin Primary source“What is the hardest task in the world? To think.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson Primary source