1950s, Address at the Philadelphia Convention Hall (1956)
“And that’s the question we all must answer -- what kind of Europe, what kind of America, what kind of world will we leave behind. And I believe that if we hold firm to our principles, and are willing to back our beliefs with courage and resolve, then hope will ultimately overcome fear, and freedom will continue to triumph over tyranny -- because that is what forever stirs in the human heart.”
2014, Address to European Youth (March 2014)
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The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, 11 September 2006
1930s, Speech to the Democratic National Convention (1936)
Source: By Art Koroma, from page 256 of Holy Axiom Truth Exposed... the Bible Is a Myth (2014) note: It appears President Barack Obama started this misattribution. I can find no reference to this quote on the Internet prior to his May 15, 2016 commencement address at Rutgers State University. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/05/15/remarks-president-commencement-address-rutgers-state-university-new
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, p. 270.
Context: To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
Response to questions about the investigation of Robert Oppenheimer's supposed Communist sympathies
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower (1954), p. 435
Cited in [Brendon, Piers, Ike: His Life & Times, 1st edition, 1986, Harper & Row, New York, ISBN 0-06-015508-6, p. 270 of 478, The Dawn of Tranquility]
1950s