Mario Cuomo Quotations

If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail, a smart accountant can keep a thief from paying taxes, a smart reporter could ruin your reputation- unfairly.

Every minute brings a new opportunity. Every minute brings new growth, new experiences.

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.

America was born in outrageous ambition, so bold as to be improbable. The deprived, the oppressed, the powerless from all over the globe came here with little more than the desire to realize themselves.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

I had not even thought of running for president until one day in 1991, at a small fund-raiser, completely unanticipated, someone stood up and said, 'Hey, Mario, in all the years we've supported you, we've never heard you talk about the presidency, and we want to know why not.'

In this life, you should read everything you can read. Taste everything you can taste. Meet everyone you can meet. Travel everywhere you can travel. Learn everything you can learn. Experience everything you can experience.

A lot of my stories about the old days, they're delicious and funny. But every time I recall the early days, it's painful. With every anecdote, it's painful because you're summoning up the terribly, terribly difficult life of my parents. And it's painful because I didn't realize at the time how hard it was for them.

I am a trial lawyer. Matilda says that at dinner on a good day I sound like an affidavit.

I have no plans, and no plans to plan.

We must get the American public to look past the glitter, beyond the showmanship, to the reality, the hard substance of things. And we'll do it not so much with speeches that will bring people to their feet as with speeches that bring people to their senses.

The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in fifty years what my father taught me by example in one week.

Every time I've done something that doesn't feel right, it's ended up not being right.

I said I didn't want to run for president. I didn't ask you to believe me.

The mugger who is arrested is back on the street before the police officer, but the person mugged may not be back on the street for a long time, if ever.

You want calamities? What about the Ice Age?

Decide exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to help people, or do you want to be powerful?

Barack Obama is probably one of the brightest in terms of sheer intelligence... also probably the best orator we've ever had as a president.

Bill Clinton has done more to help the middle class than any leader in decades.

California is an unusual and electric kind of state - it's wonderful. All sorts of things happen there.

I concentrated on a lot of things, so very few people saw me as an education governor, an infrastructure governor.

I don't ever recall having a political argument with Bob Grant. I've known him a long time. I've always liked him.

There is a respectable body of economic thought that holds that casino gambling is actually economically regressive to a state and a community.

Scott Stringer has a record of standing up to special interests and getting results for the people of Manhattan. I know a real reformer when I see one and Scott Stringer is the real deal.

Oh yes, Ed prefers to think he beat himself rather than somebody else beating him. He thanked me for saying that.

My favorite thought about Abraham Lincoln is he believed in two things: loving one another and working together to make this world better.

No one in the modern history of this country, no president, has done more to move toward a balanced budget than has President Bill Clinton.

Nobody has ever gotten a bigger push than Bill Clinton gave to Obama.

I did once answer the question 'What would you say on your tombstone?' I know what I would say: 'Mario Cuomo, 1932 - dash,' and, 'He tried.' That's it.

I love bunt plays. I love the idea of the bunt. I love the idea of the sacrifice. Even the word is good. Giving yourself up for the good of the whole.

There is no basis to say I'm being coy about running for president. If I chose to explore the presidency, I wouldn't do it in a backward way. I'll say, 'I'm exploring the presidency.'

He was agonizingly long, ... but don't make the mistake thinking that is a fatal error. I've known him as a governor for a long time and I think he's extremely talented. He has the strength of being able to focus. He has a single ambition, and he has always had this ambition, and it is to someday be president of the United States.

I think - something I learned recently looking up the meaning of ideology. If you look in American encyclopedias, it says, you know, 'Rules for - basic rules for a system of economics or politics.' If you look in the Oxford, it says that, and then it says... 'Despite - and people will hold these propositions despite events.'

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work fifteen and sixteen hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

I went to electric razors so I would not have to look at myself in the morning.

Religion is extremely important in this democracy - so important that it occupies a prime position in the Bill of Rights.

Organized belief in spirituality - that's what a religion is.

People like Pete Peterson, the former secretary of commerce and Blackstone and titan of Wall Street, etc., has been writing books for years about the debt and deficit.

Lincoln isn't a man with ingrown toenails, he's an idea.

Lincoln had bad press, too. He wasn't appreciated until after he was gone.

I will take a draft to the Yankees or to the Mets. A draft for president is not conceivable.

I wish I were as good a man as my son is.

The American people need no course in philosophy or political science of church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman.

I was badly mauled by people in New York State for being against the death penalty for 12 years.

Yeah. Just think, if I had been there the speeches would have gone on even longer. Maybe two hours!

The problem is that you can't impose the church's teachings on all Americans as a matter of law.

You have these people who don't like the government they're supposed to be running,

We Democrats still have a dream. We still believe in this nation's future.

There's something about rhetorical violence that is ugly and worrying.

It seems to me he has everything it takes to make a really great candidate. I'm delighted and pleased we're endorsing him, and I'll do everything I can to help.

David Robinson chose to stay at Navy. He talked about commitment, loyalty and values. I wonder how many of us would choose these virtues rather than the chance of becoming a millionaire, especially if you were a college sophomore when you had to make that choice.

The biggest aggravation in the Arab world, the biggest reason for their anger toward us and the creation of those suicide terrorists, is Israel and the difficulty with the Palestinian issue.

The beauty of America is that I don't have to deny my past to affirm my present. No one does. We can love this nation like a parent and still embrace our ancestral home like cherished grandparents.

I'm not better than other politicians, but I'm different because I got into the game much later in life, after I had raised a family, after I had written a book, after I had been a successful lawyer. It's different when you get into this business after you've led a full life. I don't want to be a big man. I know who I am.

I love immigrants. Legal, illegal - they're not to be despised.

In 1984, I gave a speech at Notre Dame titled 'Religious Belief and Public Morality.' I said that Catholic legislators will live by the laws of the church because we want to stay in the club.

In 1982, I wrote in my diary that life is motion, not joy. If the way you measure success in life is by how much joy it brings you, you're measuring inaccurately. Life is also sadness, defeat, striving. It is many things.

In 1980, in 1984, millions of middle-class Democrats became Reagan Democrats, and more of them drifted toward the Republicans with Bush in 1988.

In 1962, President Kennedy succeeded in captivating Americans by explaining the advantages of being the first country to reach the moon and the dangers of allowing another nation to beat us there.

I have no quarrel with people seeing me as a sinner.

I guess a psychiatrist would say there's some good to the venting process, but it does also promote an attitude of saying, 'Hey there's nothing wrong with being filled with hate; there's so much of it around.' I don't like that.

I had a chance to go on the Supreme Court of the United States, and my whole family was more disappointed in my deciding not to do that than in my deciding not to run for president - much more.

If you can manipulate news, a judge can manipulate the law.

If you were Merlin and you had taken a young boy with a fragile build and dipped him into the cauldron of boiling juices from lizards' insides and produced a knight with the biggest, broadest sword ever seen, you wouldn't have a better miracle than Giuliani produced by 9-11,

In '86 or '87, the welfare lists were at the lowest level in 17 years. Why? Because the economy was the best it was in 17 years. There were jobs.

If I want to run for president, you'll be able to tell.

If I made a mistake in terms of running for president, the mistake was not in refusing to run in '91.

I'd say, "That's it, Charlie, you're going to be by yourself for a hundred years.

I am one who believes that the world goes from the slime to the sublime. And you can take Darwin and all your philosophers and all your ontologists, and that's the direction.

For too many, the dream of economic mobility has been replaced with a nightmare of economic stagnation.

The truth is the justice system does need review, there are troubling questions that need to be answered, law enforcement needs to respect the community and the community needs to respect law enforcement.

The problems of a retired schoolteacher in Duluth are OUR problems. That the future of the child in Buffalo is OUR future. That the struggle of a disabled man in Boston to survive and live decently is OUR struggle. That The hunger of a woman in Little Rock is OUR hunger. That the failure anywhere to provide what reasonably we might to avoid pain is OUR failure.

It is not a government's obligation to provide services, but to see that they are provided.

Those two principles: We're supposed to love one another and we're supposed to work together to make the experience better. That's all the religion you need, really, to make a success of this planet...

I talk and talk and talk, and I haven't taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.

I watched a small man with thick calluses on both hands work 15 and 16 hours a day. I saw him once literally bleed from the bottoms of his feet, a man who came here uneducated, alone, unable to speak the language, who taught me all I needed to know about faith and hard work by the simple eloquence of his example.

The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind.

There are only two rules for being successful. One, figure out exactly what you want to do, and two, do it.

A shining city is perhaps all the president sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another part to the shining city. In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it.

Democracy is not meant to be efficient, it is meant to be fair.

It's an old story; it's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak, are left behind by the side of the trail. The strong, the strong they tell us, will inherit the land. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.

We believe in only the government we need, but we insist on all the government we need.

I somehow got this reputation of diddling and dithering. I don't remember dithering at all.

I think it's already apparent that a good part of this Nation understands - if only instinctively - that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church, is wrong and dangerous.

In the end, I'm convinced we will all benefit if suspicion is replaced by discussion, innuendo by dialogue; if the emphasis in our debate turns from a search for talismanic criteria and neat but simplistic answers to an honest - more intelligent - attempt at describing the role religion has in our public affairs, and the limits placed on that role.

People asked me what I want as an epitaph: 'He tried'

You will not be able to tell that they are capable of greatness until you provide them with a packed house, a 3-and-2 count and the game is on the line.

I told them that my grandfather had died in the Great Crash of 1929 - a stockbroker jumped out of a window and crushed him and his pushcart down below.

When you've parked the second car in the garage, and installed the hot tub, and skied in Colorado, and wind-surfed in the Caribbean, when you've had your first love affair and your second and your third, the question will remain, where does the dream end for me?

I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.

Entertainers and sports figures achieve fame and wealth but find the world empty and dull without the solace and stimulation of drugs.

Outrage is easy, cheap, and oversold. The nation needs less anger and more thoughtful reflection, less shouting and more listening, less dissembling and more honesty.

It's a Little Leaguers game that major leaguers play extraordinarily well, a game that excites us throughout adulthood. The crack of the bat and the scent of the horsehide on leather bring back our own memories that have been washed away with the sweat and tears of summers long gone...even as the setting sun pushes the shadows past home plate.

People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: 'Don't decide what you don't have to decide.' That's not evasion, it's wisdom.

Wes Clark is a man of whom you can ask a question, and he will look you directly in the eye, and give you the most truthful and complete answer you can imagine. You will know the absolute truth of the statement as well as the thought process behind the answer. You will have no doubt as to the intellect of the speaker and meaning of the answer to this question....So you can see, as a politician, he has a lot to learn.

Most of us have achieved levels of affluence and comfort unthought of two generations ago. We've never had it so good, most of us. Nor have we ever complained so bitterly about our problems.

For me to make lasagna would be a desecration of a great Italian dish. . . . I don't mess with sacred things.

The closed circle of materialism is clear to us now - aspirations become wants, wants become needs, and self-gratification becomes a bottomless pit.

What I didn't do was pick one thing and keep saying it over and over again, so I could have gotten credit for it.