Name: President Kennedy's Speech at Rice University
Uploaded: 2017-05-30T07:55:42.000Z
Duration: 18 min 16 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

President Pitzer, Mr. Vice President, Governor,

Congressman Thomas, Senator Wiley, and Congressman Miller,

Mr. Webb, Mr. Bell, scientists, distinguished guests, and ladies and gentlemen:

I appreciate your president having made me an honorary visiting

professor, and I will assure you that my first lecture will be very brief.

I am delighted to be here, and I'm particularly

We meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for

progress, in a State noted for strength, and we stand in need of all

three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade

of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance.

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds.

Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today,

despite the fact that this Nation¹s own scientific manpower is

doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times

that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of

the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far

No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but

condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man¹s recorded history in

a time span of but a half-century. Stated in these terms, we know

very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them

advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them.

Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged

from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years

ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity

began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year,

and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year

span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.

Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available.

Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power,

and now if America's new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus,

we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.

This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but

create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems,

new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high

costs and hardships, as well as high reward.

So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are

a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of

Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who

waited and rested and wished to look behind them.

This country was conquered by those who moved forward--and so will space.

William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth

Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are

accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised

If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that

man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and

cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead,

whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of

all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other

nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.

Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the

first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern

invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation

does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of

space. We mean to be a part of it--we mean to lead it. (applause)

For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond,

and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile

flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.

We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of

mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.

Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation

are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry,

our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others,

all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men,

and to become the world's leading space-faring nation.

We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained,

and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.

For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.

Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States

occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether

this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.

I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space

any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea,

but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war,

without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet.

Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind,

and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal?

And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain?

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,

not because they are easy, but because they are hard,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,

because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,

and one  we intend to win, and the others, too.

It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift

our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions

that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.

In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for

the greatest and most complex exploration in man's history.

We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket,