Success Quote by Robert Kennedy

Kennedy’s line is a neat piece of political jujitsu: it takes the most common weapon of the status quo - realism - and flips it into a moral failing. “Why” is cast as the question of the complacent, the resigned, the people who treat existing arrangements as if they were laws of nature. “Why not?” is framed as courage, but also as permission: a short, forward-leaning phrase that invites an audience to see constraint as choice.

The intent isn’t dreamy abstraction. It’s agitation with a purpose. In the 1960s, “the way they are” included legalized segregation’s afterlives, poverty amid postwar plenty, and a Vietnam policy defended with bureaucratic fatalism. Kennedy is speaking into a national mood where institutions kept insisting their hands were tied. His rhetoric refuses that premise. By reducing political conflict to two questions, he dramatizes a fork in the road: one path validates caution as wisdom; the other turns imagination into a civic duty.

The subtext is competitive, almost prosecutorial. If you’re asking “why,” you’re not merely practical - you’re protecting yourself from responsibility. If you ask “why not,” you’re volunteering to be judged by outcomes, not excuses. The line works because it’s less a call to fantasy than a demand to expand the boundary of the possible, then dare the audience to name the real reason they won’t cross it.