Top 177 Kennedy Quotes

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

Kennedy was like a rock star. Carter was the earnest outsider at the height of Washington cynicism. Clinton was a bad boy who proposed his ‘third way’ of Democratic politics, and Obama brought hope and change to a country that so desperately needed it.

I don’t care what your politics are, I would wager that if you asked any American woman which administration would she have most liked to work for as social secretary, she would pick Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House as the place to be.

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but one of my favorite authors is William Kennedy; his books, to me, almost read like historical dramas because the mythologies are so detailed as he wove fiction with the factual history of Albany.

But to make a long story short, I decided that I was going to run, and I announced that I was going to run for president in Florida, I would be the favorite son from Florida, and that would stop Johnson and Kennedy from dividing up the state.

I just find Bobby Kennedy’s short campaign for president so inspiring because his rhetoric identified what America can be like if we care about each other.

Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.

You know, at parties, people always ask, ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ Well, I don’t have an alibi!

I go back and think of President Kennedy, who had a military service background, but he comes into the presidency, and he’s faced with a decision on the Bay of Pigs, with the C.I.A. and the military giving him data, and it turns out very badly.

I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.

In America, people of a certain age ask, ‘Where were you when Kennedy was shot?’ In my house you were more likely to be asked, ‘Where were you when you first read ‘The Catcher In The Rye?’

I used to think Cape Wind was a great idea. That was when Ted Kennedy was alive and railing about how he might spill his Chivas if he had to keep maneuvering the Mya around all those noisy seagull-murdering wind turbines. Anything Ted Kennedy was against, I was for.

Kennedy said that if we had nuclear war we’d kill 300 million people in the first hour. McNamara, who is a good businessman and likes to save, says it would be only 200 million.

I would like to see ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ by John Kennedy Toole adapted.

The language has changed. When I grew up and watched the campaigns of John Kennedy, even with Richard Nixon, there was a lot higher level of civility. Now we describe a disagreement as an attack.

Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors – they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking.

My first presidential primary vote was for Bobby Kennedy.

When President Kennedy set us on a path to the Moon in the 1960s, he knew exactly why – to produce a photo-op that would clearly show America would be the winner in the decades-long battle of political systems called the Cold War.

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.

I think he Oswald felt he was a failure and for the United States and for President Kennedy and all of us. He knew he was a failure at everything he tried, frustrated, with a very sad life, but he was a Marxist.

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.

John F. Kennedy asked us what we could do for America. This Democratic Party asks what can government give you. Don’t worry about paying the bill, it’s on your kids and grandkids.

I think Democrats made a mistake running away from liberalism. Liberalism, uh, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John and Robert Kennedy – that’s what the Democratic party ought to reach for.

I had my serious side – I idolized Bobby Kennedy; he was my role model. But so was Jerry Lewis.

The party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater.

Kennedy did not have to run the risk of having his ideas and his words shortened and adulterated by a correspondent. This was the television era, not only in campaigning, but in holding the presidency.

Kennedy lied and lied about his health while he was alive, even using his father’s influence to get into the Navy without ever taking a medical examination.

The people I really most admire are Robert Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. If you know someone, it is very hard to revere them.

Unlike the Kennedy dynasty, who always knew how to pay off people who might make trouble, the Windsors can’t bring themselves to part with any royal trinkets.

Since Kennedy’s death, the nation has not seen, in any of his successors, his cosmopolitan intellectualism or the oratorical eloquence with which he sought to lead the nation by the power of his words.

Joe Kennedy isn’t in the habit of having incompetents around. I wouldn’t have lasted three months if I didn’t have some ability.

I have absolutely no intention of marrying Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

From the moment he took office in January of 1961, Kennedy had been eager to settle the Cuban problem without overt military action by the United States.

Kennedy saw the presidency as the vital center of government, and a president’s primary goal as galvanizing commitments to constructive change. He aimed to move the country and the world toward a more peaceful future, not just through legislation but through inspiration.

Jackie Kennedy was the most appropriately dressed first lady we’ve ever had. You can see how lasting Jackie’s style is.

Ted Kennedy was not terribly effective when he first became a senator.

I moved to Naples, Florida, and by 15 I was into punk: Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, Operation Ivy. Along with the classic punk bands, like the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Misfits, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat – all those bands that you get into when you’re first getting into punk.

Well, the senators I’ve enjoyed working with the most would be Ted Kennedy and Kent Conrad, because they were both either chairman or ranking member of the committee I was chairman or ranking member of. And in both instances they were just great people to work with.

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.

I kind of struggled as a 10-year-old to make out what it meant that Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed within two months of each other. I think I was 14 when Watergate happened and a president was impeached. So between my birth and age 14, I just saw a lot of turmoil.

In my lifetime, we’ve gone from Eisenhower to George W. Bush. We’ve gone from John F. Kennedy to Al Gore. If this is evolution, I believe that in twelve years, we’ll be voting for plants.

I was sent the script for ‘Silver Linings’ when I was doing a play in D.C. at The Kennedy Center with Cate Blanchett and I was sent the script and asked if I was interested, and I said ‘Oh, boy am I!’

I could do John Wayne, Jack Benny, Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and entertain my friends. But I never seriously considered it as a career choice.

You’re not a baby boomer if you don’t have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.

I guess my claim to fame is I’ve now gaveled Ted Kennedy to order twice.

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

Hillary had never run for office before, but she decided to give it a try. She began her campaign the way she always does new things, by listening and and learning. And after a tough battle, New York elected her to the seat once held by another outsider, Robert Kennedy.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.

For style and for creating a mood of optimism and hope – Kennedy on that count is as effective as any president the country has had in its history.

There was no sense of burden, like, ‘I now must carry on Robert Kennedy’s unfinished work.’ Absolutely not.

We don’t have the capability today to put a human being in space of any kind, shape or form, which is absolutely, totally unacceptable when we got the greatest flying machine in the world sitting down at Kennedy in a garage there with nothing to do.