Cuban Missile Crisis Quotes

My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis is plain: Strength prevents war; weakness invites it. We need a commander-in-chief who understands that – and who won’t leave us facing a foe who thinks he doesn’t.

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

But the most important thing about that story, which is not often told, is that as a result after the Cuban missile crisis, immediate steps were taken to correct our inability to collect on the movement of nuclear material out of the Soviet Union to other places.

Originally, John Kennedy was going to come speak, and then Lyndon Johnson. Because it was October of ’62, neither made it because of the Cuban missile crisis.

Those of my generation who grew up in the midst of the Cold War had a very, very strong awareness and very much were sort of influenced by the demonization of the Soviet Union, whether that was through the Cuban Missile Crisis or duck-and-cover, or any of those things that so affected us then.

Of course, nobody does [want another Cuban Missile Crisis].

We’re eyeball to eyeball…and I think the other fellow just blinked.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

Kennedy was haunted by the Bay of Pigs invasion but carried the country through the Cuban Missile Crisis. He later increased the number of U.S. military advisers to South Vietnam to more than 16,000.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, decisions made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev could have plunged both countries into thermonuclear war.

The most terrifying moment in my life was October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I did not know all the facts – we have learned only recently how close we were to war – but I knew enough to make me tremble.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

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

Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.