Student Council Quotes for Campaign Speeches, Posters and the Day After: 10 Real Lines

What can you say in ninety seconds, from a stage in a school gym, that makes classmates who barely know you write your name on a ballot? Most student council candidates reach for a quote, and most of them reach for the same handful of poster lines, several of which the person named on the poster never said.

This page collects 10 student council quotes that hold up: each one is given in the wording of the speech, essay or letter it comes from, with the date and a few lines on who said it and why. They are grouped by the moment you will need them, from the campaign speech to the first meeting after you win (or the day after you lose). In the middle there is a short guide to building a speech around one line, and near the end a list of five poster favorites to leave off your campaign materials.

Lines to open a campaign speech

An opening quote has one job: tell the room what kind of representative you plan to be before you list a single promise. The two below both do that by turning the question away from the candidate and toward the voters.

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

— John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, Washington, D.C., January 20, 1961

Kennedy spoke these words near the end of his inaugural address, after a long passage about the Cold War; the full text is on the American Presidency Project. For a student council speech the line works best when you swap "country" for your own school in the sentence that follows it: "So I am not going to ask what this school can do for me. I want to tell you what I plan to do for it." Then name one concrete thing. The quote earns the room's attention; the concrete promise keeps it.

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Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

— Barack Obama, speech on the night of the Super Tuesday primaries, Chicago, February 5, 2008

Most posters shorten this to "We are the ones we've been waiting for" and drop the first sentence, which is the part that makes it a call to act now. The line itself is older than the speech: it closes June Jordan's "Poem for South African Women," which she presented at the United Nations on August 9, 1978, and which ends "we are the ones we have been waiting for" (text at Poets.org). If you use it, quoting Obama is accurate for his wording; mentioning Jordan as the poet he was echoing is a nice touch for a teacher-judged speech. Obama's full remarks are on the American Presidency Project.

Short enough for a poster or a button

Posters get read in the two seconds it takes to walk past them in a hallway. These two are short, they are about how to lead rather than about winning, and they come from people students already know.

Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.

— Martin Luther King Jr., "The Drum Major Instinct," sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, February 4, 1968

King preached this sermon two months before his death, about the wish to be first and to be praised, which he called the drum major instinct. His answer was not to suppress it but to point it at service: be first in generosity, first in kindness. That makes it an unusually honest line for an election, where every candidate is, in plain terms, asking to be first. The first sentence fits on a poster on its own; the date and place are confirmed by the King Institute at Stanford.

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How we explain that when someone is cruel, or acts like a bully, you don't stoop to their level -- no, our motto is, when they go low, we go high.

— Michelle Obama, remarks at the Democratic National Convention, Philadelphia, July 25, 2016

Michelle Obama was describing how she and her husband talked to their daughters about public life; the transcript is in the Obama White House archive. On a poster, "When they go low, we go high" tells voters you will not run a mean campaign, which matters in a school where everyone will share a cafeteria with the other candidates the day after the vote. Use it only if you keep the promise: a candidate who quotes it and then mocks a rival's posters loses more than the election.

Building a 90-second speech around one quote

Most schools give candidates one to three minutes. That is room for one quote, not five. A simple structure that fits:

1. Quote (10 seconds). Say it slowly, name the speaker once, and do not explain it yet.
2. Turn it toward the school (15 seconds). One sentence that connects the line to something everyone in the room knows: the lunch line, a club that lost its funding, the dance that got cancelled.
3. Two concrete promises (40 seconds). Things a student council can actually do. Students notice when a candidate promises a longer lunch break the principal will never approve.
4. Who you are (15 seconds). Grade, one or two things you have done that show you will follow through.
5. Back to the quote (10 seconds). End with a short echo of the opening line, not the whole quote again.

Here is how that looks with the Kennedy line, as an example to adapt, not to copy word for word: "'Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.' I am not asking what Central can do for me. I want to tell you what I will do for Central: get the broken water fountains on the second floor on the council's list in the first month, and start a suggestion box that someone actually reads. I'm in tenth grade, I've run the book drive for two years, and I show up. So ask what I can do, and then hold me to it."

Two practical checks before you print anything. First, say the speaker's name the way the source does (the "Michelle Obama" line is hers, not her husband's). Second, keep the wording exact; if you shorten a line, cut from the end rather than rewording the middle. For more lines that fit speeches and class walls, see our leadership quotes for students, and for posters with very little space, the short leadership quotes for students page.

After you win: the first council meeting

The campaign is about you; the job is about everyone who did not vote for you too. These two lines are good for an installation ceremony, a first newsletter, or the top of the first agenda.

…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

— Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863 (Bliss copy)

Lincoln wrote out five copies of the address; the Bliss copy is the only one he signed and dated, and it is the text carved on the Lincoln Memorial (transcription at Abraham Lincoln Online). The phrase is the shortest definition of representative government in English, which is what a student council is on a small scale. A good use: read it at the first meeting, then ask each new member to name one group of students they will make a point of hearing from (the bus riders, the transfer students, the ones who never come to assemblies).

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home—so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person; the neighborhood he lives in; the school or college he attends; the factory, farm, or office where he works.

— Eleanor Roosevelt, remarks at the United Nations, New York, March 27, 1958

Roosevelt spoke these words at the UN while presenting In Your Hands, a guide for community action, about ten years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights she had helped draft. One caveat for careful speakers: the UN Library notes that no original transcript of these remarks has been found; the text above is the standard version, and part of the speech was quoted in The New York Times the next day. For a student council it is the right scale: rights and fairness are tested first in "the school or college he attends," which is exactly the place the council is elected to look after.

If you lose, or the vote is close

Most candidates lose: there is one president and several people who wanted to be. A short, gracious message the next day is remembered longer than the campaign. These two lines are good for that message or for a concession at the results assembly.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood…

— Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Roosevelt gave the speech a year after leaving the White House, and this "man in the arena" passage has been quoted ever since by people who tried something in public and fell short (full text at the Theodore Roosevelt Center). It is about everyone who ran, not only you, so it works as a thank-you to the other candidates as well. Keep the tone light: you lost a school election, not a war, and the passage is grand enough without adding drama.

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Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, at the Radcliffe Day luncheon, Harvard, May 29, 2015

Justice Ginsburg said this on the day she received the Radcliffe Medal, answering a question about what advice she would give young women; the Radcliffe Institute reposts the original HuffPost report. It is a good line for the day after a loss because it points to what you can still do: the issue you campaigned on does not need a title. Join a committee, bring the idea to the winner, and get other students behind it.

For the advisor's bulletin board or civics week

These two are less about any one election and more about why a school has a student government at all. Advisors use them on the council board, in the election announcement, or in a civics-class lesson about voting.

Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, message for American Education Week, September 27, 1938

Roosevelt wrote this for the annual American Education Week, dated in the same week as the Munich crisis in Europe; the message is on the American Presidency Project. For a school election it makes a fair point to voters, not candidates: read the platforms and listen to the speeches before you vote for your friend.

Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to help build what we called the Beloved Community, a nation and world society at peace with itself.

— John Lewis, "Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation," The New York Times, July 30, 2020

Lewis wrote the essay shortly before he died on July 17, 2020, and it was published on the day of his funeral (reprinted with the Times citation at the Civil Rights Movement Archive). The same essay contains his best-known phrase: ordinary people can redeem the country "by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble." For a student council, the first sentence is the useful one. A council is not a club you join once; it is something its members keep doing, meeting by meeting.

Slogans are not quotes

A lot of people searching for "student council quotes" actually want a slogan, and the two are different jobs. A quote is borrowed and needs the right name and wording next to it. A slogan is yours: short, often a pun on your name, and only has to be catchy and honest. Formats that work, with made-up names as examples:

• Name pun: "Don't be a Tim-id voter" or "Make the Wright choice."
• Promise in four words: "Longer passing periods, real answers" (only if you can push for it).
• Quote echo: "Ask what we can do," a nod to Kennedy without misquoting him.

Keep slogans and quotes on separate lines of the poster so nobody mistakes your pun for something a president said.

Five poster favorites to leave off

These lines appear on student council boards every year, credited to famous names. None of them has a record tying it to that person. Each verdict links to the research:

• "Be the change you wish to see in the world" (Gandhi). Not in his writings. The nearest real text is his 1913 "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change," and the short slogan form appears in the 1970s (Quote Investigator).
• "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world" (Margaret Mead). No source in her work; the earliest known printing is a 1982 book epigraph, after her death (Quote Investigator).
• "If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair" (Shirley Chisholm). The earliest source is a 2005 recollection by Donna Brazile in People, after Chisholm's death; it is not in her books (Quote Investigator). If you use it, say "as Donna Brazile remembered her saying."
• "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn" (Benjamin Franklin). No evidence he said it; the idea goes back to the Chinese philosopher Xunzi, and the Franklin credit first appears in 1986 (Quote Investigator).
• "Whatever you are, be a good one" (Abraham Lincoln). The earliest version is the novelist Thackeray's "Whatever you are, try to be a good one," recalled in an 1897 memoir; the Lincoln credit dates from 1946 (Quote Investigator).

We keep a longer list of these in leadership quotes leaders never said. A teacher who spots a fake credit on your poster will remember it, so a quick check is worth the minute.

Which line for which moment

Questions students ask

What are some good campaign quotes for a student council election?

For the speech, John F. Kennedy's "ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country" and Barack Obama's "We are the ones we've been waiting for." For posters, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve" and Michelle Obama's "when they go low, we go high." All four are given above with their exact source.

Should I put a quote on my poster or a slogan?

Both can work, but keep them apart. A slogan is yours and can be a pun on your name; a quote has to carry the right speaker and wording. One short quote plus one slogan is plenty for a poster read in passing.

If you end up leading a team after the election, the same habit carries over: our guide to quotes for team meetings covers how to open a meeting with one line without it feeling forced.