The Wit and Wisdom of Ted Kennedy - Bill Adler [12]
—Letter to President Obama, May 12, 2009
Last night the nation paused to pay tribute to Rosa Parks, whose life and dedication to equal opportunity for each and every American will be forever written in the heart and souls of the nation and in the pages of our history. The light that shone in the Capitol last night cast its beams across the country. The tears of the Parks family were the tears of a nation that will remain eternally in the debt to this great woman who became a profile in courage for our time and all time. When Rosa Parks sat down half a century ago, America stood up. Her quiet fight for equality sounded the bells of freedom for millions and awakened the moral conscience of the nation. We will always remember that great December, when Rosa Parks sat alone, so that others could sit together.
—Tribute to Rosa Parks, October 31, 2005
He [Ronald Reagan] was always a good friend and a gracious foe. He wanted to defeat his opponents, but not destroy them.
—Remarks about former President Reagan,
April 2007 (quoted on Politico.com)
Individual faults and frailties are no excuse to give in—and no exemption from the common obligation to give of ourselves.
—Ted Kennedy quotation
read by President Barack Obama
as part of his eulogy
delivered at the funeral mass,
August 29, 2009.
The strength of the family is our greatest national treasure.
—Speech, May 26, 1976
We do not need more study. We do not need more analysis. We do not need more rhetoric. What we need is more leadership and commitment.
—Speech, July 27, 1972
It does not take a constitutional amendment to reduce the federal deficit or balance the federal budget. All it takes is enough courage by Congress and the administration to make the tough decisions we’re elected to make. If we’re not willing to balance the budget, the Constitution can’t do it for us.
—Statement opposing the Balanced Budget
Amendment, March 1, 1994
The challenges we face will require important changes in the structure of our institutions. It will not be easy to fit these changes into old categories, liberal or conservative, radical or reactionary. Instead, they will bring to our public life new meanings for old words in our political dialogue—words such as “power,” “community,” and “purpose.”
—Speech, May 14, 1978
If Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition and try to act like Republicans, we will lose—and deserve to lose. … Democrats must be more than warmed-over Republicans. The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties.
—Speech at the National Press Club,
January 11, 1995, shortly before the swearing-in
of the new Congress under Republican control
The most troublesome questions confronting Americans do not have Republican answers or Democratic answers. … They have human answers, and American answers, for they are the questions that ask what kind of life we want to lead and what kind of nation we want to have.
—Commencement address,
Manhattanville College, June 12, 1970
This Administration has had its chance—and it failed the basic test of competence. It failed to deploy adequate focus in Iraq to win the peace. It failed at Abu Ghraib. It failed in granting sweetheart deals to Halliburton. It has failed the loss-of-confidence test, the basic test of Presidential leadership.
—Remarks on the Senate floor
on the Bush Administration’s
multiple failures of leadership in Iraq,
September 10, 2004
Part of the larger challenge we face is that Congress is a crisis-oriented institution, with few mechanisms and little inclination to deal with problems before they become acute. … We need better distant early warning signals, better mechanisms and institutional arrangements for handling problems which are not yet brush fires, but which are already smoldering and may well cause the conflagrations of the future.