Almost all general statements about the world are wrong. They are not necessarily false; they seem to me just to be inadequate. It is true, for examp… - Lyndon B. Johnson

Unworthy as I am of your honor, I deeply appreciate your generosity. The torch of John Kennedy that I picked up when he faltered I shall proudly carry on as long as I have the energy and the life to carry it. I am most grateful to B'nai B'rith and the Anti-Defamation League. They have the gratitude of this Nation. In your half century of fighting discrimination you have never tired, you have never faltered, you have never lost faith in your cause and your cause has given faith to your Nation.

I have traveled a long way from this college to the office that I now occupy. In few times, yes, in very few nations, in man's journey has it been possible for any man to travel such a road. In Washington I am surrounded by men who have come from every walk of life to the most responsible posts of government. For that is what your government really is. It is not a strange and alien power in a remote and menacing city. It is a banker from New York and a druggist from Minnesota, the son of a tenant farmer from Texas. Some day it may very well be some of you. America has succeeded more than any other nation in the world in making it possible for a man to achieve whatever his ability would allow. The idea that man's only limitation would be his talent and intelligence, and his willingness to work, has been at the heart of the American dream, and for some of us it has come true.

So long as I am President, I intend to honor the mandate of the Constitution that I am sworn to uphold. I intend to see that this Government, as the servant of this great people, "provides for the general welfare." Welfare is an old and honored work of our system. One of the first acts of the first Congress, under President Washington, was to provide pensions for invalid soldiers. Under John Adams what was to become the Public Health Service was established. President Abraham Lincoln proposed the first assistance for widows and children. President Theodore Roosevelt called the first White House Conference on Care of Dependent Children. It was President William Howard Taft who first established the Children's Bureau. These were works of compassion, triumphs of justice. But there are factions today which condemn social justice as the work of those that were bent on centralizing power in Washington. They forget their history, and they betray their ignorance of the American people.