Entry in progress—B.P.


The Yale Book of Quotations
Edited by Fred R. Shapiro
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press
2006
Pg. 420:
John F. Kennedy
U.S. president, 1917-1963
“This is not a time to keep the facts from the people—to keep them complacent. To sound the alarm is not to panic but to seek action from an aroused public. For, as the poet Dante once said: ‘The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.’”
Speech, Tulsa, Okla., 16 Sept. 1959 (printed in John F. Kennedy, The Strategy of Peace, ed. Allen Nevins [1960]). No passage in Dante matches Kennedy’s words, so the quotation seems to belong to Kennedy rather than the poet. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., states in A Thousand Days [1965] that Kennedy wrote “The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality” in a loose-leaf notebook of quotations kennedy kept in 1945-1946 and attributed these words to Dante.

Google News Archive
30 November 1954, Milwaukee (WI) Sentinel, “Letters to The Sentinel,” pt. 1, pg. 10, col. 5:
Dante was quoted on this general subject to this extent: “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in a period of moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.”
JOHN J. MORTON
P.O. Box 235
Antigo, Wis.