Remarks at the Ceremony Honoring the Presidential Scholars of 1966.

Secretary Gardner, distinguished scholars, your parents, your teachers:

Every week I welcome dozens of visitors to this historic White House. I greet distinguished men and women from every walk of life and from every corner of our land. But the most honored guests are always those who are set apart by high achievement.

So I welcome you here today as members of very distinguished company. Of course, I am very happy that you are younger members, because ever since my early days as a teacher I have been interested in and attracted to the young. I have tried to keep young by meeting with the young and learning from them.

Last week I met with the graduating class from the high school where I taught in Texas, almost 30 years ago. Today I meet with you. Tomorrow I will meet out here with more than 1,000 students from the rural electric cooperatives from every State in the Union.

And by the end of the week I should feel, and I hope I do feel, as young as you do.

I have asked you to come here so that I could thank you and compliment you and your teachers and your parents. But I also want to challenge you. So this afternoon I bring you more than a medallion to mark your honor. I bring you the pride and the hope of a Nation that cherishes excellence and commitment, and that has never needed your kind of excellence and commitment more than it needs it right now.

You have been born into an age which will give you no rest. You will find that there is no security on this earth, except the security of opportunity. You will discover that democracy has never been more a voyage of adventure, and never less a safe harbor, than it is in the time in which you live. And as long as you live, you will make that voyage in a world awash with waves of turbulence and change.

Our dizzying ability to discard the old and to create the new; our giant leaps in travel and quantum jumps in communication; our marvelous capacity to shrink the world and our terrifying ability to destroy it--all these and more are the challenges that surround you. They make standing still impossible and retreat unthinkable for the young scholar, the young businessman, the young farmer--every member of your generation.

The world that your elders have created is full of promise, but it is far from perfect. We stand now, your generation and mine, where Robert Frost had his mounted rider pause and say: "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."

As young people you probably feel like the horse in that famous poem. You shake your harness and you are eager to get on. I hope you are, because tomorrow is coming up very fast behind you.

Today, almost half our population is already under 30 years of age. In 5 years almost half our people will be under 26 year of age. But it is not your numbers alone that make you so important. Your Government does not count you as faceless digits. Your country does not count you as punched holes in a manpower computer card. We do not count you. What we really do is count upon you.

We count upon you as individuals. We prize your individuality. We work here in Washington to encourage and to enlarge it--to give your individualism new room and new reason to grow.

We are moved by a first principle that should be familiar to you as scholars--Hato's timeless insight that "States are as the men are, they grow out of the characters of men."

So we look to you for the qualities of national greatness. Your country looks to your character, your convictions, your individual commitment to the ideals of democracy-and to the works of democracy without which the ideals are just so many dime-store decorations.

I do not believe that you want it said of your generation that you committed social suicide. I do not believe you want it said of any American boy or girl that they squandered their lives in small and petty pursuits. I do not want the finger to point at a single one of you and say: "There is the spoiled fruit of affluence--soft at the core." And neither do we want the judgment on this Nation to read: Its children were pampered and without purpose.

You will have to earn your tomorrow. Many of your grandfathers and grandmothers--and some of your parents--built this Nation by hand and will, by day and by night and against the elements, the circumstances, and great odds. They succeeded because they looked not to themselves but to those who followed--to their children and their children's children--to the birthright of a better life their sweat and sacrifice would buy for you.

Yes, that was yesterday. But today the questions that hold the answer to the future are not very different. I ask them now of you--and I ask them now of every member of your generation: Who are you thinking of? What will you build? How much will you leave behind?

Not long ago they called you "The Silent Generation." But you proved them wrong and you didn't need the electric guitar to do it. Then it was "The Shook-Up Generation." And now it is "The Beat Generation." Well, I do not believe the labels, but I do believe in young people and I do believe in you. I believe in you for what you are-individuals and individualists. I believe in your spirit and your spunk. And I think you have shown plenty of both.

The Presidential Scholars program has been running 3 years. In the first year the commission picked a girl named Lucille Toly. In the third year, this year, they picked her sister, Caroline Toly. The odds against this are huge in such stiff competition. No wonder the commission was so surprised when told that it had picked two girls from one family out of the 200 million people who live in this country. The girls are the daughters of Michael T. Toly, a sheet metal worker in Seattle, Washington, and a member of Local 99 of the Sheet metal Workers Union.

A sheet metal worker's daughters achieving intellectual distinction is an "only-in-America" story. And every American is so proud that that could happen here in our country.

Now it shows that in your generation that you have zest and you have zeal and you have love of life. And it shows in your concern for life--your willingness to fight poverty and to win social justice at home and throughout the world. It shows in the courage and independence of your ideas. And it shows your impatience with the old prescriptions.

It shows in your search for a new and more meaningful identity, your conviction that morality and responsibility must always guide your quest. It shows in your appraisal of modern society and giant organizations-in your recognition that both must still serve and not master the individual.

So your opportunity today lies in working for your country and for your fellow citizens--on voter education, in civil rights programs, in city planning and in management, in countless problem areas.

It lies in the Peace Corps and in the Teacher Corps and in VISTA--and as my daughter, Luci, reminded me a few moments ago, in the Volunteers for Vision.

Yes, opportunity and challenge meet also in the obligations of military service when that kind of duty is necessary. We wish that it were never necessary, but unfortunately we do not live in a world where the wish is father of reality.

We live in a world where men still pursue their ambitions with force. And there is no escape hatch from this kind of reality-not yet, anyway.

There will always be some, of course, who share the view of the young man who last week excused himself by saying that "Patriotism just doesn't turn me on." Well, nobody wants to turn him off, either. No American, young or old, must ever be denied the right to dissent. No minority must be muzzled. Opinion and protest are the life breath of democracy--even when it blows heavy.

But I urge you never to dissent merely because someone asked you to or because someone else does. Please know why you protest. Know what it is that you dissent from. And always try, when you do disagree, to offer a choice to the course that you disapprove. For dissent and protest must be the recourse of men who, in challenging the existing order, reason their way to a better order.

I was delayed seeing you a little bit today, because three distinguished Americans-Senator Morse, Professor Richard Neustadt, and a distinguished young lawyer, Mr. David Ginsburg--who make up an emergency labor board, have been reasoning together between employer and employee to avoid a crippling nationwide airline strike that would ground the planes that haul 6 out of 10 people in this country.

There has been protest and there has been dissent. There has been a demand for a change from existing order. They want to go to a better order. But these three men, appointed by the President, have been hearing the pros and cons and the improvements and the problems. They have collected 2,000 pages of testimony. This is the way it should be.

Yes, we can always be a young country. We can always be a people of the future. We can be that nation that was foreseen by Senator Cass of Michigan more than a century ago when a French visitor asked him: "If this be the youth of the Republic, what will be its old age?"

"Sir," the Senator replied, "it will have no old age."

Thank you very much.