Quotes from Mario Cuomo

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.