Paul Tsongas
Paul Tsongas was born on February 14, 1941, in Lowell, the city that would shape the contours of his life from beginning to end. He attended Lowell High School before pursuing his education at Dartmouth College, then Yale Law School, and later the John F. Kennedy School of Government — a sequence of institutions that carried him from his hometown outward into the wider currents of American public life.
A member of the Democratic Party, Tsongas entered elected office as a representative of Massachusetts in the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1975 to 1979. He then advanced to the Senate, where he represented Massachusetts from 1979 until 1985. His career as a politician reached its widest national scope when he ran for president in 1992. During the Democratic primaries that year, he won eight contests before losing the nomination to Bill Clinton.
Tsongas died on January 18, 1997, in Lowell — the same city where he had been born fifty-five years earlier. His political life had taken him from Lowell to the floors of Congress and across the competitive landscape of a national primary campaign, yet his story concluded where it had begun.
Quotes by Paul Tsongas
You are Americans. You love this country. Together we are entrusted with the principles that represent mankind’s greatest political and social achievement.
No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time – the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.
It was a myth that’s often perpetuated at commencement that holds that only hope and promise lie beyond the halls of academe. Don’t worry, be happy. Everything is fine.
Let’s try winning and see what it feels like. If we don’t like it, we can go back to our traditions.
My father’s generation gave to my generation a land of wealth and purpose and world economic dominance.
Lowell is my home. It is where I drew my first breath. It is where I will always derive a sense of place and a sense of belonging.
Don’t fear your mortality, because it is this very mortality that gives meaning and depth and poignancy to all the days that will be granted to you.