Quotes from Mario Cuomo

Hate sells.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

You want calamities? What about the Ice Age? God made this world, but didn't complete it.

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

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.

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

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.

I have no plans, and no plans to plan.

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.

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'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.

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

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.

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.

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.'

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

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

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

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.