I will never forget the 5th anniversary of the Peace Corps where I sat — Ted Kennedy

"This really is a very strange idea. We cannot found national policy on fond memories of radio serials, dreams of the Old West, and the thrilling days of yesteryear. We must reject the preposterous notion of a Lone Ranger in the sky, firing silver laser bullets and shooting missiles out of the hands of Soviet outlaws. The best defense against nuclear war is arms control and then disarmament."

"TWO WEEKS ago Senator Ted Kennedy uttered what may turn out to be the single most disgusting remark made about the United States in the course of the Iraq War. The reaction to his slander - or rather, the lack of reaction - speaks volumes about the moral bankruptcy of the American left."

"Then there will be the Jeffords amendment, which is a sense of the Senate that does not impose unfunded mandates, of which we are in strong support. Finally, there will be a Gorton amendment to the school-to-work legislation. The Senator from Washington would provide tax credits for the hiring of summer youth. We are in opposition to the Gorton amendment, and there will be a motion to table the amendment. We have tried to work this issue out. There may be changes in the Summer Youth Program, but this amendment would not really provide any kind of accountability, no assurance that at the end of the summer these young people would continue to work. We do not know how decisions would be made as to which companies would be able to get the approval of the young people. So we recommend tabling the Gorton amendment."

"Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized – the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old....When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception."

"In sum, I believe that the basic constitutional arguments supporting the power of Congress to change voting qualifications by statute are the same in the case of literacy, residence, or age. So far as I am aware, the Administration proposals in the area of literacy and residence have encountered no substantial opposition on constitutional grounds. Both proposals were incorporated as amendments to the Voting Rights Act in the bill passed by the House of Representatives late last year, and they are now pending before the Senate. If Congress has the authority to act by statute in these areas, as it must if the Administration bill passed by the House is constitutional, then Congress also has the authority to act by statute to lower the voting age to 18. I am hopeful, therefore, that we can achieve broad and bipartisan agreement on the statutory route to reach our vital goal of enlarging the franchise to include 18 year-olds."

"I hope for an America where neither "fundamentalist" nor "humanist" will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls."

"As long as you keep getting born, it’s okay to die sometimes."

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that theres free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

"History is a strange experience. The world is quite small now; but history is large and deep. Sometimes you can go much farther by sitting in your own home and reading a book of history, than by getting onto a ship or an airplane and traveling a thousand miles. When you go to Mexico City through space, you find it a sort of cross between modern Madrid and modern Chicago, with additions of its own; but if you go to Mexico City through history, back only 500 years, you will find it as distant as though it were on another planet: inhabited by cultivated barbarians, sensitive and cruel, highly organized and still in the Copper Age, a collection of startling, of unbelievable contrasts."

"As soon as a thought or word becomes a tool, one can dispense with actually ‘thinking’ it, that is, with going through the logical acts involved in verbal formulation of it. As has been pointed out, often and correctly, the advantage of mathematics—the model of all neo-positivistic thinking—lies in just this ‘intellectual economy.’ Complicated logical operations are carried out without actual performance of the intellectual acts upon which the mathematical and logical symbols are based. … Reason … becomes a fetish, a magic entity that is accepted rather than intellectually experienced."

"Our feminist culture at the present moment is completely dependent on capitalism. My grandmother was still scrubbing clothes on the back porch on a washboard!"

"A word of the faith that never balks, Here or henceforward it is all the same to me, I accept Time absolutely. It alone is without flaw, it alone rounds and completes all, That mystic baffling wonder alone completes all. (23)"