Political Quotes

“I never cease to learn from my good friend from New York. In the quarter of a century I have been in this Senate, there have been a number of memorable Senators, none that I have learned more from than Pat Moynihan. I count him as a friend, a teacher, a mentor. It is interesting how we sometimes take the same facts, however, and reach different conclusions. I went to law school at New York University in the center of Manhattan in the mid-1950's. And much as I love New York and Manhattan and find it an exciting borough, when I finished law school I had no desire to stay there. I went back to Oregon and started to practice law and kept my home and roots there ever since. But I remember public housing in the mid-1950's in New York. The Federal Government dictated what public housing would be, and we knew best. Our philosophy was that, if people had a decent roof over their heads, all else would flow and follow. Education would follow, crime would disappear; so long as you had a decent shower and a bed. So we built, not 5- and 10-story public housing projects, 20- and 25-story public housing projects. And we clustered them together; not one building, but three or four, with concrete parks, barely any grass for the kids to play, and thousands and thousands of roughly similarly economically situated poor people clustered together. What we ended up with were 20- and 25-story slums, crime-ridden, drug-infested slums. It did not work.”