Quotes About George Mitchell

#1. I think George Mitchell is a consummate professional. He is the ideal selection to handle the job of special envoy if you choose to have a special envoy.

John F. Kerry

#2. Senator [George] Mitchell is a man of many talents and he's swift on his feet, but one would not think of him as 'dancing with the stars.' And we had this great rock 'n' roll fund raiser.

Barbara Mikulski

#3. I would say George Mitchell was like Clark Kent sometimes with his horn rimmed glasses and his very quiet manner. People say, well, he's just a quiet leader, but then he emerges as super hero and begins to move this legislation. He led by example.

Barbara Mikulski

#4. George Mitchell wasn't the nation's first fracker. Mitchell was mighty early, though. "The majors didn't bother with fracking, they didn't want to fool with it," he says. "I saw it as the new technology.

Gregory Zuckerman

#5. Peace in the Middle East has been on the Obama administration's mind from the beginning. Two days after his inauguration, the president traveled to the State Department to announce the appointment of George Mitchell as his Middle East peace negotiator.

Elliott Abrams

#6. I would say that in some ways George Mitchell is kind of an old fashioned guy, in terms of these basic values, but he was a very modern person, encouraging, he was not only accepting but he was actually encouraging.

Barbara Mikulski

#7. I wanted to [share] what a gracious kind of guy George Mitchell was.

Barbara Mikulski

#8. You never say to a president for certain you wouldn't do anything, but I have no - look at me now - I have no desire to sit on the Supreme Court, none. It would be a great honor , but I have no desire, any more than George Mitchell did.

Joe Biden

#9. Look how Bill Cohen and George Mitchell worked together. It's the stuff of legends. And now it's the stuff of almost ancient history, regrettably, but the way those two really worked together.

Barbara Mikulski

#10. I knew of Senator [George] Mitchell because he was very close friends with who was soon to be the senior senator, Paul Sarbanes. Paul Sarbanes and George Mitchell were kind of pals together.

Barbara Mikulski

#11. People had so much respect for George Mitchell. They wanted to cooperate with him. I think that's a hallmark of a very good leader.

Barbara Mikulski

#12. I think George Mitchell was good for Maryland in the sense that he helped me get elected. It doesn't get any better than that from here on.

Barbara Mikulski

#13. His great passion for education and [making sure] people have an opportunity. Of course that's what came out of the George Mitchell Institute and his scholarships in those high schools.

Barbara Mikulski

#14. So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married.

George J. Mitchell

#15. In the spring of 1994 I decided not to seek reelection to the Senate. I had made the decision 12 years earlier, Christmas Day of 1982, just after I had been first elected to a full term, that I would do the best I could for a limited time.

George J. Mitchell

#16. I believe there's no such thing as a conflict that can't be ended. They're created and sustained by human beings. They can be ended by human beings. No matter how ancient the conflict, no matter how hateful, no matter how hurtful, peace can prevail.

George J. Mitchell

#17. I was the United States Attorney for Maine for three years, and then was appointed a federal judge.

George J. Mitchell

#18. I got a job with a law firm in Portland after a couple of years with Senator Muskie. But by then, my interest in politics had been sparked, through meeting Senator Muskie, through seeing what he did.

George J. Mitchell

#19. And I spent that time working as an insurance adjuster and going to law school in the evening, and then when I left law school, I joined the Department of Justice in Washington.

George J. Mitchell

#20. In my skimmings over fiction I cannot recall any writer so continuously implicated in his own work as George Moore.

Susan Mitchell

#21. I still love to go back to Mitchell [his home town] and wander up and down those streets. It just kind of reassures me again that there is a place that I know thoroughly, where the roots are deep. Everything had a place, a specific definition.

George McGovern

#22. I had a great interest in sports. I had three older brothers who were great athletes. I was not.

George J. Mitchell

#23. I was born and raised in a small town in Maine, Waterville. I enjoyed living there - still do - and my goal in life was a fairly specific and focused one of practicing law in Maine.

George J. Mitchell

#24. [On writer George Moore:] ... I grew curious about Moore. Yet when at the rehearsal of 'Countess Cathleen' in some dark by-way of London, I was told he was present, I cannot recall any form, only an irritation in the dusty atmosphere.

Susan Mitchell

#25. I had been involved in U.S. intelligence in Berlin, Germany, while in the military and had worked with a contact with the Central Intelligence Agency office there.

George J. Mitchell

#26. My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died - we're not sure - either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area.

George J. Mitchell

#27. I was raised in Topanga Canyon. It's an eclectic community up in the Santa Monica mountains. A lot of musicians lived there - Joni Mitchell, Neil Young - as well as artists and craftspeople.

Inara George

#28. First, the American legislative process isn't well suited to large and complex measures.

George J. Mitchell

#29. You know, the pessimism which exists now in the Middle East existed in Northern Ireland, but we stayed at it.

George J. Mitchell

#30. Although he's regularly asked to do so, God does not take sides in American politics.

George J. Mitchell

#31. I really owe everything to my parents and their devotion and drive to see to it that their children had the education which led to the opportunities that they never were able to have.

George J. Mitchell

#32. I didn't want to make it a lifetime thing. I don't believe in statutory term limits, but people can limit themselves if they want to, and that's what I decided to do.

George J. Mitchell

#33. So I developed very early a massive inferiority complex, and I've told the story often about how that inspired me later in life to get involved in other things, because I couldn't out-do my brothers in sports, and it's a very competitive relationship.

George J. Mitchell

#34. From my parents, I learned a very strong work ethic, and all of my brothers and sisters all worked from the earliest days of life right through to the present time.

George J. Mitchell

#35. What is good about the United States is the sense that you can disagree with the government and not be seen as unpatriotic, although many in the government will try to make you seem unpatriotic.

George J. Mitchell

#36. My parents were very poor, but we never felt any sense of need or want. It was a very close, loving, tightly-knit family growing up, and I never felt any sense of deprivation or anything like that.

George J. Mitchell

#37. I'm glad I made the decision, although the practice of law - and particularly serving as a federal judge - was a part of my life that I really enjoyed and treasured and look back on it with fondness.

George J. Mitchell

#38. You're a trouble-maker. What race do you belong to, anyhow?' 'The human race,' I said. 'I come from the womb and I'm bound for the tomb, the same as you, the same as King George the Six, the same as Johnny Squat.

Joseph Mitchell

#39. The board is currently undertaking what could be its most important task, ... We are confident that we're going to make a choice that is in the best interest of the company, shareholders and others.

George J. Mitchell

#40. I think Paul Sarbanes and his wife Christine socialized with them [George and Heather Mitchell] more than I did, but we all hung out, or we saw each other in groups.

Barbara Mikulski

#41. The result was, of course, that today, tragically, more than 40 million Americans don't have health insurance, and for many, not having health insurance means they don't have access to good health care.

George J. Mitchell

#42. I ain't never saw a hearse with a luggage rack." (Quote by George Strait, country singer, and appearing at the end of Bob Mitchell's memoir, Time for a Heart-to-Heart: Reflections on Life in the Face of Death.

George Strait

#43. When I went to college, my goal was to be a college history teacher. I majored in history.

George J. Mitchell

#44. As they say, one thing led to another, and, ultimately, the British and Irish governments asked me to serve as chairman of the peace negotiations, which ironically began six years ago this week.

George J. Mitchell

#45. Our firm view is that the president has no legal authority, none whatsoever, to commit American troops to war in the Persian Gulf or anywhere else without congressional authorization.

George J. Mitchell

#46. There were no aisles, so to get to the empty cot I had to climb over other senators. The first was Ted Kennedy. He was a big man, and at that moment he looked to me like Mount Everest.

George Mitchell

#47. I spent two years in the Army. And my older brother, who was also a great positive influence on me, encouraged me to think about law school, and I said - well, I didn't have any money.

George J. Mitchell

#48. My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920.

George J. Mitchell

#49. In every society in human history, including the United States, those in power seek to imbue themselves with the attributes of religion and patriotism as a way of getting greater support for their policy and insulating themselves from any criticism.

George J. Mitchell