"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic"
About this Quote
Kennedy is warning that the most dangerous distortions aren’t the ones you can fact-check in a day; they’re the ones that feel too good to surrender. A lie announces itself with fingerprints: motive, author, money trail. A myth is ambient. It lives in patriotic bedtime stories, tidy historical arcs, and slogans that let a complicated country imagine itself as uncomplicated. That’s why he frames myth as “persistent” and “persuasive” before he calls it “unrealistic.” The threat isn’t just falsity; it’s comfort that outcompetes curiosity.
The sentence is built like a piece of Cold War statecraft: measured, symmetrical, and quietly alarming. “Very often” is doing political work, steering away from melodrama while still insisting this is a frequent, structural problem. Kennedy also slips in a moral contrast. The lie is “dishonest” in the familiar way, a personal failing. The myth is “unrealistic,” a collective habit. You don’t need a villain for it to spread; you only need repetition and belonging.
Context matters. In 1962, speaking at Yale, Kennedy took aim at American complacencies and inherited narratives in the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship. The subtext is a rebuke to a public and political class that wants simple answers: that U.S. power is automatically virtuous, that history inevitably bends toward our preferences, that hard choices can be avoided if we cling tightly enough to the story. He’s not just defending truth; he’s preparing citizens for adulthood in a perilous century.
The sentence is built like a piece of Cold War statecraft: measured, symmetrical, and quietly alarming. “Very often” is doing political work, steering away from melodrama while still insisting this is a frequent, structural problem. Kennedy also slips in a moral contrast. The lie is “dishonest” in the familiar way, a personal failing. The myth is “unrealistic,” a collective habit. You don’t need a villain for it to spread; you only need repetition and belonging.
Context matters. In 1962, speaking at Yale, Kennedy took aim at American complacencies and inherited narratives in the shadow of nuclear brinkmanship. The subtext is a rebuke to a public and political class that wants simple answers: that U.S. power is automatically virtuous, that history inevitably bends toward our preferences, that hard choices can be avoided if we cling tightly enough to the story. He’s not just defending truth; he’s preparing citizens for adulthood in a perilous century.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
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