Ted Kennedy Quotes

John Kerry was the big winner in Iowa. Ted Kennedy introduced Kerry as the 'comeback kid.' That used to be Bill Clinton's name - because every time he would come back to a city, he would find out if he had a kid or not.

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

The last time I saw Ted Kennedy was a generation after my first meeting, at the Senate subway below the Capitol on Obama's Inauguration Day. He was his usual gregarious and gracious self - with beaming smile and booming voice wishing my husband and me good luck with our pregnancy and expressing his excitement about the new president.

I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.

When you are working a Republican crowd, and want to throw out some red meat, you can’t do any better than jumping on Ted Kennedy.

Scott Brown may be the last Republican to win a statewide fight in Massachusetts for a very long time. He caught the machine flat-footed in January 2010 when he out-hustled Martha Coakley and stole the Senate seat Ted Kennedy held all those years. And since then, the Democrats haven't lost a single statewide fight.

There is parallels these two great men John McCain and Ted Kennedy of great impact in the Senate, you don't agree with everything they did but certainly they had major impacts as senators. Their one major political failure not to be elected president but that didn't stop them from having enormous impact and at roughly the same age, exactly the same disease. It's kind of a poignant sad parallel.

I enjoyed working with Ted Kennedy.

Declassified papers report that John Kennedy was taking eight different medications a day. He was so wasted, his Secret Service code name was Ted Kennedy.

A white male Mormon millionaire was not gonna beat Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts, but someone deserved to go out there and give him a real run for his money.

I'm very disturbed at the picture that was painted by Senator Ted Kennedy that Samuel Alito is not a man of his word, that he is dishonest. The implication that he is not reliable I don't think is a fair characterization of what I've read.

One must remember that in the '70s, Democrats still grasping for Camelot were desperately pinning their hopes on Teddy while Republicans were doing everything they could politically to turn him into a punch line post-Chappaquiddick. And the idea of Ted Kennedy - rather than the actual man - dominated his political legacy through the early '90s.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

I ran for Congress in 1996 to help Ted Kennedy pass a comprehensive health insurance reform bill.

I think it's very important to allow people into Ted Kennedy. Thousands of people lined the streets the day of his funeral.

Ted Kennedy says that our policy in Iraq is adrift. Hmmm. Maybe like a car adrift in the water after its has gone over a bridge?

The Democrats continue to snipe at Bush. They'll never give it up to him. You know Teddy Kennedy and Tom Daschle pick more nits than a father and son spider monkey team who know they're being followed by a National Geographic film crew.

Ted Kennedy is the only person alive who might know more than we do about Chappaquiddick, and he may not.

In the end, Ted Kennedy was a politician, plain and simple. Yet he embodied how politics and public service can be successfully intertwined. You can't be a good public servant without being a good politician. Kennedy was both.

The Democrat Party is threatened by people whose economic circumstances improve to the point that they do not need government first and foremost. That's a threat. But this happens when the U.S. economy is humming. There is a lot of upward mobility, and people leave the lower depths of poverty and start traversing a pathway through the middle class to the upper middle class, and as they leave, the Democrats have to replace them. That is what illegal immigration has been since 1965 when Ted Kennedy reintroduced the whole concept after 40 years of no immigration from 1921 to 1965.

Ted Kennedy will go down in history as one of the giants of the U.S. Senate and one the most accomplished legislators in American history.

[Sen. John] Kerry is also a man who opposes the death penalty, wants to restrict access to guns and voted against the resolution approving the start of ground operations against Saddam Hussein in 1991 - just what you would expect from Ted Kennedy's partner and Michael Dukakis's running mate.

The fact is that we would have had comprehensive health care now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy's deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed in 1978 or '79.

Ted Kennedy devoted his lifetime to protecting those most in need, and tens of millions of Americans have been the beneficiaries.

Ted Kennedy's achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.