Lyndon Johnson

For we are, after all, one nation. It is our destiny to succeed or to fail as a single people and not as separate races.

I want to speak to you this morning about our society--about some of the stress that it is undergoing and about what I believe that we must do if we are to preserve civil peace and if we are to serve social justice.

It means that a major goal of Government must be to secure the right to social justice for all of our people--and for all of us to help these people fulfill that right.

Every war, large or small, is brutal and is ugly and claims its toll in lives and in fortunes.

So, men have the right to protest the condition of their lives, but they also have the responsibility not to injure the person or the property of others in making that protest.

And we shall succeed. No power on this earth can prevent us.

Our objective is to let the people of South Vietnam decide what kind of government and what kind of country they want.

The Molotov cocktail destroys far more than the police car or the pawn shop.

It is a very special pleasure for me to be in this beautiful State.

Our hope is that the North Vietnamese will soon realize that they cannot succeed in taking over South Vietnam and they will turn to the task of helping their own people and building their own nation.

Yes, we have problems, but we have successes, too.

To see if we have the people to match our problems--to see if we have the men to match our mountains.

Let us declare that the American goal in the next 10 years is modern, competent, medical care for every person of every age, whatever his means.

What happens to Lake Erie will alone affect the lives of 25 million people in the State of New York, in the land of the United States, and in our neighbor, Canada.

Brown men love freedom just as much as white men.

We can have the industrial might of Lake Erie and we can have a Lake Erie where people can swim and where they can fish, and where they can sail.

It is this bond that makes it impossible to quit the fight for an even greater America.

So, the first thing we should pledge ourselves to do is to take the profit out of poverty.

This system will at once prevent raw pollutants from entering your lake and it will purify at an economical cost the water that does reach it.

To pass a law is not to achieve a final result. To spend money is not to guarantee success.

I think it is shameful that they should continue to exist.

For my part this afternoon as your President, I pledge that this administration is going to do all that it can to build great cities for a great society.

Now many of the conditions that we seek to tame should never have come about.

I particularly want to thank all the members of the New York delegation who could come with me today, both Democrats and Republicans.

I think it is wrong for some people to line their pockets with the tattered dollars of the poor.