Quotes About Mario Cuomo

#1. It was Mario Cuomo's great gift and our good fortune that he was both a sterling orator and a passionate public servant. His life was a blessing.

William J. Clinton

#2. At times, Mario Cuomo seemed to have the humility of a Jesuit and the goals of an emperor.

Mike Barnicle

#3. Mario Cuomo famously said that we campaign in poetry and govern in prose. We also critique the government in poetry - angsty, adolescent poetry, but poetry nonetheless. The

Eliot Nelson

#4. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#5. We believe in a government that is characterized by fairness and reasonableness, a reasonableness that goes beyond labels, that doesn't distort or promise to do things that we know we can't do.

Mario Cuomo

#6. The Catholic Church did not always teach that life begins at conception.

Mario Cuomo

#7. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#8. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#10. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#12. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#14. You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#16. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#19. You can't ever make serious progress against terrorism unless you deal with Israel.

Mario Cuomo

#20. Debates are boring.

Mario Cuomo

#21. We believe in encouraging the talented, but we believe that while survival of the fittest may be a good working description of the process of evolution, a government of humans should elevate itself to a higher order.

Mario Cuomo

#22. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#23. A judge can manipulate the law. A smart lawyer can keep a killer out of jail.

Mario Cuomo

#24. I have no plans, and no plans to plan.

Mario Cuomo

#25. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#27. Please make this nation remember how futures are built

Mario Cuomo

#28. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#29. 9/11 occurs, and you're going to rebuild, and after awhile, the memory will be there, but there will be something new there, and different, and functioning, and electric.

Mario Cuomo

#30. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#34. My parents were immigrants.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#36. 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 ...

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#39. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#42. The Catholic teaching against murder, for example, is largely the same as our secular laws. But as a law, it obviously has a secular rationale at least as strong as its religious rationale.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#44. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#45. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#47. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#48. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#49. The values derived from religious belief will not - and should not - be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.

Mario Cuomo

#50. The truth is that beginning in the 1970s, the heart of our Democratic party, America's strong striving middle class, began drifting away from us.

Mario Cuomo

#51. We are disgusted by the things that we desire, and we desire what disgusts us.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#56. The first good player I watched as a kid was Joe DiMaggio, and that was like ballet. Since then, I played sandlot and college ball and came to understand how difficult it can be.

Mario Cuomo

#57. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#58. Tax should be the same for everybody.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#61. Way down deep the American people are afraid of an entangling relationship between formal religions - or whole bodies of religious belief - and government.

Mario Cuomo

#62. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#63. You want calamities? What about the Ice Age?

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#66. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#68. 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.'

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#71. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#73. The Mafia is a question every time an Italian raises his head.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#76. We believe in a government strong enough to use words like "love" and "compassion" and smart enough to convert our noblest aspirations into practical realities.

Mario Cuomo

#77. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#79. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#83. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#84. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#86. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#88. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#90. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#91. 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.

Mario Cuomo

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

Mario Cuomo

#93. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#94. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#95. 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?

Mario Cuomo

#96. 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.'

Mario Cuomo

#97. 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.

Mario Cuomo

#98. 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.

Mario Cuomo