“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.”

—  John F. Kennedy

Remarks Recorded for the Opening of a USIA Transmitter at Greenville, North Carolina (8 February 1963) Audio at JFK Library (01:29 - 01:40) http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKWHA-161-010.aspx · Text of speech at The American Presidency Project http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9551
1963
Variant: A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death." by John F. Kennedy?
John F. Kennedy photo
John F. Kennedy 469
35th president of the United States of America 1917–1963

Related quotes

Subhas Chandra Bose photo

“One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives.”

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) Indian nationalist leader and politician

"Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians" at Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html

Fred Hoyle photo

“It is in the world of ideas and in the relation of his brain to the universe itself that the superiority of Man lies. The rise of Man may justly be described as an adventure in ideas.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Frontiers of Astronomy (1955), p. 1

Erich Fromm photo

“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

Source: Man for Himself (1947), Ch. 4

Steve Biko photo

“It is better to die for an idea that will live, than to live for an idea that will die.”

Steve Biko (1946–1977) anti-apartheid activist in South Africa

Quoted in Scott MacLeod, "South Africa: Extremes in Black and Whites" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,975037,00.html, Time, March 9, 1992, p. 38
Quoted in "The Mind of Black Africa" (1996) by Dickson A. Mungazi, p. 159

“It may take years to put your idea into action. But if it has real worth, time will prove it, and you will have something that will endure.”

William A. Patterson (1899–1980) President of United Airlines from 1934 until 1966

Unsourced

Christopher Marlowe photo

“All live to die, and rise to fall.”

Christopher Marlowe Edoardo II

Edward II

Nisargadatta Maharaj photo

“You may die a hundred deaths without a break in the mental turmoil. Or, you may keep your body and die only in the mind. The death of the mind is the birth of wisdom.”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Source: I Am That: Talks with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton photo

“We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man can not live without cooks.
He may live without books,—what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope—what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,—what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?”

Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton (1831–1891) English statesman and poet

Part i, canto ii.
Lucile (1860)

“The intellectual … may live for ideas, as I have said, but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque. Although there have been zealots whom we may still regard as intellectuals, zealotry is a defect of the breed and not of the essence.”

Richard Hofstadter (1916–1970) American historian

Source: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1974), p. 29

Alan Turing photo

“The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical," i.e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas.”

Alan Turing Computing Machinery and Intelligence

Source: Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), p. 454.
Context: Another simile would be an atomic pile of less than critical size: an injected idea is to correspond to a neutron entering the pile from without. Each such neutron will cause a certain disturbance which eventually dies away. If, however, the size of the pile is sufficiently increased, the disturbance caused by such an incoming neutron will very likely go on and on increasing until the whole pile is destroyed. Is there a corresponding phenomenon for minds, and is there one for machines? There does seem to be one for the human mind. The majority of them seem to be "sub-critical," i. e., to correspond in this analogy to piles of sub-critical size. An idea presented to such a mind will on average give rise to less than one idea in reply. A smallish proportion are super-critical. An idea presented to such a mind may give rise to a whole "theory" consisting of secondary, tertiary and more remote ideas. Animals minds seem to be very definitely sub-critical. Adhering to this analogy we ask, "Can a machine be made to be super-critical?"

Related topics